The Blackburn Point Bridge Turns 100 This December. Sarasota County Might Decide Its Future First.

"I have been here sitting by the boat dock when emergency vehicles have to come, and they are stopped because the bridge is open." That's part-time resident Susan Kalage, describing what happens on a fairly regular basis at Blackburn Point Road, where a one-lane swing bridge built in the mid-1920s still turns sideways every time a sailboat needs to pass through Little Sarasota Bay.

If you live in Nokomis or on Casey Key, you already know this bridge. You've waited behind the striped gate arm while it swings open for a mast too tall to clear underneath. You've timed a grocery run around it without quite meaning to. What you may not know is how close Sarasota County actually is to deciding whether that bridge gets to see its 100th birthday as itself, or as a memory.

A century old, and one of only 11 left

The Blackburn Point Bridge was built between 1925 and 1926, connecting Casey Key to the mainland at US 41 near the Nokomis-Osprey line. It's listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the Sarasota County Register of Historic Places, and it's one of only 11 active swing-span bridges left anywhere in Florida. That's not a small distinction in a state that replaced almost all of its manually operated bridges decades ago.

It's also one of just two roads onto Casey Key, the other being the Albee Road bridge to the north. That geography is the whole reason this has become a countywide debate rather than a quiet maintenance decision. County engineers say the bridge's 16-foot travel lane has no shoulders, no sidewalks, and no dedicated bike lane, and that corrosion has been chipping away at its structural components for years. James Stock, the county engineer who has walked residents through the project at all three public meetings so far, put it plainly in June: the repairs the bridge needs now are repairs on top of repairs.

What changed between April and June

Here's the detail that got lost in most of the coverage, and it's the one that actually matters if you cross this bridge regularly. In April 2026, Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation volunteer Tommye Whittaker was telling neighbors that the county's consultant had priced a repair-and-preserve option at around $6 million, and that a more realistic number was probably closer to $10 million. That's the figure most residents walked away with after the second public meeting.

By the third meeting on June 11, the number on the table for renovating the existing bridge had climbed to an estimated $31 million, according to county officials, and even that spend was projected to buy only about ten more years of service life. A full replacement, by comparison, was estimated by county officials at somewhere between $30 million and $50 million back when Transportation Director Spencer Anderson first unveiled design concepts in November 2025.

In other words, the gap between "save the bridge" and "replace the bridge" didn't just fail to close over the past year. It nearly disappeared. If renovating a swing bridge from 1926 costs close to what a new one costs, and only buys a decade, that reframes the whole argument for anyone who assumed preservation was the cheaper, lower-risk path.

The case for keeping it

None of that has quieted the people fighting to save the bridge, and it's worth understanding why. On May 18, more than a dozen plein air painters gathered on the Casey Key side to paint the bridge in watercolor, oil, and acrylic, drawing attention to what organizers call the county's plan to replace a century-old landmark with what critics are calling, bluntly, a concrete and steel structure that won't look anything like it.

"This area of Florida right here, Osprey, is pretty amazing because it has escaped a lot of the sprawl and the growth that you see around us in Sarasota." — Karie Daniel, commercial boat captain

Retired Sarasota County historical resources director Dave Baber has raised a different objection, pointing at the county's own track record rather than the bridge itself:

"You spent a lot of money to do something that you knew 25 years ago was wrong."

Whether or not you side with the preservation campaign, that's a fair question for any Nokomis resident to ask before the county spends eight figures either way.

The case for replacing it

The safety argument isn't hypothetical for the people who live here full time. Hardesty & Hanover consultant Jim Phillips, who has led the community meetings, presented crash data from 2019 through 2024 showing 10 reported crashes within the project's 700-foot study area, two of them involving pedestrians or cyclists. He also testified that if the bridge is ever closed to traffic, detouring via Albee Road instead adds roughly 10.5 miles to the trip off the key, a real number for anyone thinking about hurricane evacuation timing rather than a Tuesday commute.

Not everyone at the meeting bought the framing. Nokomis resident Trevor Davis, whose mother lives on Casey Key, argued the crash data was cherry-picked, since the study area sees comparable pedestrian and bicycle incidents on the key itself. Fellow Nokomis resident and boater Jonathan Hunter asked a more practical question: why not just restrict weight loads on the existing bridge instead of replacing it outright? County officials responded that the real driver of deterioration isn't the traffic crossing the bridge, but the marine environment underneath it, corroding the mechanical swing components regardless of how light the vehicles above are.

What actually happens next

This isn't an open-ended debate anymore. Sarasota County has already held three public meetings, on August 19, 2025, November 12, 2025, and June 11, 2026, walking through everything from a no-build option that keeps the current single-lane bridge with ongoing repairs, to a wider two-lane swing span, to a single-leaf bascule bridge design. According to the county's own project updates, a formal public hearing is tentatively scheduled for fall 2026, when the County Commission will finally weigh in and give direction on how the Project Development and Environment Study should proceed. If that timeline holds, the decision on this bridge's future could land in the same season it turns 100.

Residents who want to weigh in before that hearing can still submit comments through the county's Blackburn Point Bridge project page, or reach the project team directly by calling 311 from within Sarasota County. The Casey Key Association has also been tracking the process closely on its own site, for anyone who wants the plainest version of what's actually being studied versus what's just been rumored at a happy hour.

Why this matters if you already live here

You don't need to have an opinion on bascule bridges to feel the stakes. The next time you're idling at the gate on Blackburn Point Road watching a mast glide through, or grabbing a table at Casey Key Fish House and half-watching the boats clear the span from the patio, you're looking at a piece of infrastructure that's genuinely closer to a decision than it's been in decades. Whatever the Commission decides this fall, the version of this bridge that turns 100 in December may not be the version still standing a year from now, and that's true whether you're the kind of resident who wants it preserved exactly as it is, or the kind who just wants an ambulance to get through without waiting on a sailboat.

Stories like this are exactly why we keep paying attention to what's actually happening in the neighborhoods we work in, not just what's on the market. If you want more of this kind of on-the-ground read on Nokomis, Casey Key, and the rest of the Sarasota area, Lisa McBride and the team are always tracking it. Let's Connect — Start Your Sarasota Search.