Homeowners associations and resident groups eager to have the state’s transportation department pay for landscaping upgrades on adjacent state-maintained streets or highways might someday have to pay those maintenance costs themselves.
Sarasota County commissioners last week asked legal staffers to look into the possibility of perhaps establishing specific improvement districts, with connected tax levies, to pay for such things as watering, pruning, mowing and fertilizing.
Right now, the county’s transportation department is on the hook for maintaining landscaping built on state roads “in perpetuity,’’ said county Director of Transportation Spencer Anderson. In at least one example recently, a proposed median-beautification project along about a mile and a half of U.S. 301 from Myrtle Street to University Parkway was scuttled by the state over the county’s refusal to pick up the maintenance tab…