Mayor Cardamone, Officers and members of CCNA, Ladies and Gentlemen; I am Pete Theisen, I am the Anti Growth candidate.

We have a tradition in Sarasota that if you want a job you will find a job in a day or two. Uncontrolled growth has changed that – now we have a boom-bust economy and when we are in a bust, we're in a bust now, there are no jobs - workers look for work for months without finding anything. On top of that, it is nearly impossible to get an unemployment claim processed even if you are qualified to receive it.

We have to do something else for jobs right now other than build new buildings. We have a two year real estate sales backlog, for one thing, and for another, the building trades don't actually employ legal citizens anyway, up to 95% or even more of the workers on a given project might be undocumented.

I think we need to use our development skills to develop something else, like the overhead rail system that has been mentioned from time to time. Our people who usually build high rise office buildings can build a park and ride train station with the same skills and tools they now have. Our concrete finishing folks can finish concrete on a train loading platform as easily as they can finish a driveway or garage on a detached home.

A small, city only train system could have four park and ride stations and maybe 24 platforms. This is the best time in years to get federal funds for something like this with our new president who got himself elected on “Hope and Change”. If for some reason the federal funds don't come you can still do about the same thing by letting the train equipment suppliers build and run the system for a specified time – we need to do it any way we can. Add an eight passenger golf-cart feeder shuttle network to the trains and buses to make it attractive so people will actually use it.

Once it is done, we will have transportation capacity above and outside the mix of what we now have for transportation. Then the infrastructure to support new development might be there, and maybe the sales backlog will be smaller, too.