Officers and members of Sarasota County Civic League, 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. We're in a bust now, there are no jobs, however long you look.

Growth, more than anything else is responsible for the Job Bust. We have to do something else for jobs right now other than build new buildings. We have a two year real estate sales backlog.

I think we need to use our development skills to develop something else, like an overhead rail system with park and ride train stations and loading platforms. You can build these with the same skills and tools that our building trades people now have.

A small, city only overhead train system could have four park and ride stations and maybe 24 platforms. If the county buys into the idea the project will be even bigger. You can do it all with federal funds or by awarding a concession for maybe 15 years to the system provider. 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. By that time the other infrastructure to support new development might be completed, and maybe the sales backlog will be smaller, too.