Walk the Boulevard of the Presidents this month and the island looks finished. New awnings, fresh paint, a lobby full of chocolate at 28A South. If you moved here after the 2024 storm season, you might not clock the two-year gap between "damaged" and "done." If you lived through it, you know the storefronts recovered faster than almost anyone expected.
What you may not know is that the harder repair, the one under the sidewalks, hasn't started yet. The Sarasota City Commission only committed to it on July 20, and residents are being asked to sign up for a bill nobody can quote them yet.
The storefronts came back first
Simone Salustri and Amber Mayner closed Le Colonne when Helene and Milton hit, and instead of waiting, they ran an Italian food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen to keep the business alive while they figured out what came next. What came next was Nōnnō Umberto, a rebrand honoring Salustri's father, which opened in the first week of January 2026 at 22 South Boulevard of the Presidents. The soft opening was supposed to be quiet. It served roughly 250 people the first night and grew to 800 over the week.
A few doors down, the three-unit building at 28 South Boulevard of the Presidents took on flooding that required drywall replacement up to four feet and new electric and HVAC systems. It's fully leased now: Acadia Jewels Fine Jewelry & Design opened January 1, Le Shop, a coffee shop, wine bar and market, opened in November, and Chocolate Emporium, the Anna Maria Island chocolatier's second location, opened in June with a menu that includes a St. Armands-exclusive bacon and caramel bark.
Add the ownership change at St. Armands Jewelers, where Mia Eylon took over this August, and the January opening of The Sarasota Style, a lifestyle and clothing brand at 410 St. Armands Circle, and the retail picture is not just recovering. It's turning over. New names on old addresses, new addresses filling old vacancies.
The comeback that's still arguing with itself
Not every reopening is this clean. Restaurateur Tom Leonard, part of the development group Kaufman Shore Properties, wants to bring Shore back to the corner of North Boulevard of the Presidents and Madison Drive as a restaurant, café and retail store. The plans went before the city's Development Review Committee on July 15, and planning staff had questions. The third floor is labeled "residential" on the site plan, but individual rooms are marked "suite," which reads to some as a future push toward short-term rentals in a Commercial Tourist zone that doesn't currently allow them. Leonard hasn't hidden that ambition.
The building will also incorporate flood-proof glass at street level, a strategy meant to satisfy FEMA's 50 percent rule, the regulation that requires substantial renovations on flood-prone properties to include elevating the structure above flood level unless the cost stays under half the building's value. It's a small design detail with a large implication: on this island, even a straightforward restaurant renovation now runs through federal flood math before it runs through a kitchen design.
The bet nobody's finished paying for
Here's the part of the recovery you can't see from the sidewalk. On July 20, the City Commission voted unanimously, twice, to move forward on burying every overhead electric and communications line from St. Armands Circle to the far end of Lido Key. The first vote approved a $7.95 million professional services agreement with Utility Consultants of Florida, a Largo firm that beat out Kimley-Horn and Bowman Consulting for the work. The second adopted Resolution 26R-3408, authorizing an $8 million tax-exempt line of credit to front the money.
Charles Haff, vice president of the St. Armands Residents Association, told commissioners that more than 80 percent of the roughly 3,500 households on the barrier islands support the project, even knowing it likely means a special assessment near $10,000 per property spread over 20 years. That figure isn't locked in. Public Works Director Nikesh Patel told the commission the exact cost, and even the threshold of resident support required to proceed, won't be set until the consultant's work is farther along. Neither state nor city ordinance requires a minimum level of support for a special assessment district. The commission decides that number later, once it has real cost data in hand.
That's the part worth sitting with if you own property here. The city is spending real money and locking in a contractor before residents vote on whether to actually pay for the result. If the assessment districts don't get approved, the project stops, but the city stays on the hook for the $3.17 million already spent on required services.
Commissioner Hagen Ahearn-Koch pushed staff to make sure the undergrounding work is coordinated with a separate St. Armands drainage improvement project moving through Sarasota County and a new state appropriation via the Florida Department of Transportation.
"I want to make sure we're not digging up, filling in and digging up again," Ahearn-Koch said at the July 20 meeting.
Commissioner Kyle Battie tied the infrastructure question directly to the storefront recovery you can see today, noting the ongoing struggle to fill retail space on the Circle while some Lido families are still rebuilding from the storms. In his framing, the new chocolate shop and the buried power line aren't two separate stories. They're the same recovery, running at two different speeds.
The timeline from here: this summer and fall, the consultant refines district boundaries and builds planning-level cost estimates. Staff returns to the commission in winter 2026-27 with parcel-level assessment ranges, and that's when the actual resident vote happens. If it moves forward, the target for first billing is November 2027.
The other two recoveries happening at the same time
The shoreline itself is mid-repair. The Lido Key beach renourishment project placed roughly 311,000 cubic yards of sand on the southern half of the island starting in January 2026, dredged from New Pass as part of a 50-year agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that schedules renourishment every five years. Dune construction, the vegetative work that stabilizes the new sand, is expected to run from this fall through early 2027, on the same rough clock as the utility assessment vote.
A few minutes east, Bird Key Yacht Club is in the middle of its own resilience project: a $20 million hurricane-resilient clubhouse rebuild slated to open this year, replacing the 1959 building the club has operated from since its founding. It's a private project, but it tracks the same logic as the public one on St. Armands: after 2024, rebuilding to the old standard stopped being the plan.
What's actually on the calendar
For everything still under construction, the island's social calendar hasn't slowed down. If you're planning your fall around it, here's what's confirmed:
- Third Thursdays on St. Armands, a monthly evening event, runs throughout 2026
- Exotic Cars on the Circle returns September 5, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at St. Armands Circle Park
- The St. Armands Art Festival and Craft Marketplace runs September 12 and 13, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
None of these wait on a commission vote. The storefronts, the food trucks turned brick and mortar, the third Thursday crowds. That part of the island's recovery is already finished business.
The layer that decides what comes next
If you live on St. Armands or Lido Key, the useful thing to track this fall isn't another restaurant opening. It's what happens when city staff comes back to the commission with real parcel-level numbers instead of an estimate. That's the moment the 80 percent support figure gets tested against an actual bill, and it's the moment that determines whether the island's next hurricane season looks like 2024's did or looks different.
The storefronts told you the island was open again. The vote this winter will tell you whether it's actually built for what's coming.
If you're weighing a move to Lido Key or St. Armands, or thinking about what a property here is worth once the assessment picture is clearer, Melissa Gissinger can walk you through what these projects mean for a specific address, not just the island as a whole. Book an appointment to talk through it.
