Newly Funded Initiatives

Manatee County Commissioners Fund Housing Initiatives, Trails and Flood Forecasting

Posted on 01/29/2025

MANATEE COUNTY, FL (January 29, 2025) – The Manatee Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) approved a low-interest $2.3 Million Catalytic Loan to Community Assisted and Supported Living, Inc. (CASL), to assist with the acquisition of a 1.154-acre commercial development, located at 8076 North Tamiami Trail, redeveloping the site to a 72-unit affordable housing project for low- and very low-income households.

“We’ve worked with CASL before,” said District 4 Commissioner Mike Rahn. “I’m in full support of this for CASL to build workforce housing.”

The BOCC also is using a $2.9 Million grant award through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Economic Development Initiative for the design, property acquisition and construction of the Manatee County Palmetto Trails Planning and Design (PTCMP) project. This grant includes Shared-Use Nonmotorized (SUN) Trail Segments and Connectors, evaluation of critical trail segments between the Manatee County Area Transit Center, Palmetto Youth Center, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Trail, Lincoln Memorial Middle School and Lincoln Park, as well as the rehabilitation of the historic Lincoln Tunnel under U.S. 41. It also includes further development and evaluation of trail segments connecting Lincoln Park and Washington Park through the neighborhoods just east of U.S. 41.

In addition, commissioners submitted a list of transportation project priorities to the Sarasota-Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization. This report presents proposed County projects, such as bridge replacements, road widening and trails implementation, and their rankings for 2025. MPO staff will combine the County's adopted list with those of other agencies to create a master list for the MPO and Florida Department of Transportation. In general, any projects selected for funding from this list will appear in State Fiscal Year (FY) 2030 or 2031 of the Florida Department of Transportation’s (FDOT) five-year program approved by the legislature in 2026.

Commissioners also approved $473,750 to expand the County’s Real-Time Flood Forecasting (RTFF) computer programming, which takes existing static drainage modeling available from Watershed Management Plans (WMP) and incorporates dynamic weather forecasting of potential rainfall accumulation totals to generate predicted flood staging and potential flood inundation coverage. Now known as FloodWise, this program provides advanced modeling of flood stages and flood inundation, which in turn are utilized to determine the timing, sequence and draw-down necessary to create additional flood storage preemptively of a forecasted storm event. Public Works crews have already been able to pre-emptively drain flood-prone areas to help alleviate some of the worst effects of heavy rainfall during recent storms.