BRADENTON BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The start of “snowbird” season in Florida is only weeks away, but many Florida Gulf Coast beaches, regularly voted some of the best in the United States, are closed to the public because of the devastation from Hurricane Milton two weeks ago.
Most restaurants and shops in the tony St. Armands Circle district of Sarasota were flooded with water from Milton and Hurricane Helene, which tore through Florida almost two weeks ahead of Milton. The dominant performing arts hall in Sarasota is closed until January because of extensive damage. Mounds of debris are scattered along Gulf Coast roads.
Hurricane Milton’s devastating toll along Florida’s Gulf Coast hit one of the most popular areas for snowbirds — temporary residents who spend winter months in the Sunshine State — right before the start of the season which generally runs from after Halloween to around Easter. Milton landed on a barrier island in Sarasota County as a Category 3 hurricane. The storm swamped coastal homes with mounds of sand, pushed water inland and caused tens of billions of dollars in privately insured losses up and down the Gulf Coast.
Visitors need to stay away for the time being so they don’t interfere with the work of residents and recovery workers, said Larry West, a construction contractor who has been pulling long hours digging out 4-feet (1.2-meter) drifts of storm-driven sand at a condo complex on Manasota Key, about 32 miles (19.8 kilometers) south of Sarasota.
“Give this area time. Don’t come here,” West said. “It doesn’t help when you get people in the way.”
Other Floridians on the Gulf Coast are taking the opposite view. In Clearwater, more than 55 miles (34.1 kilometers) north of Sarasota, Mayor Bruce Rector said he has been fielding calls from as far away as Canada, asking him, “Mayor, when will it be safe for Canadians to return to Clearwater?”
“I told them, ‘Today,’” Rector said during a recent meeting of the Pinellas County Tourist Development Council. “It’s not going to be perfect, but you’re going to have a similar experience to what you’ve always had here.”
Shawn Kaleta, one of the largest property owners on Anna Maria Island, about 20 miles north of Sarasota, also feels bullish about this season as reservations at the rental properties he manages are trending up from where they were last year.
Florida, a state with 23 million residents, has about 1.5 million seasonal residents annually, with about a third coming from Canada.
Evan Rachkovsky, communications director of the Canadian Snowbird Association, said he hasn’t heard of any members canceling their plans, even those whose homes were damaged, although some are delaying their trips until the situation improves.
“Most of our members are still going to be proceeding south as planned,” Rachkovsky said.
Some snowbirds have already made their annual migration south despite the latest storms, returning to their pickleball groups and tennis leagues even as some of their neighbors’ condos remain unlivable.
Because of Sarasota’s renown for a thriving performing arts scene, a sizable chunk of its snowbirds are performing arts patrons. Milton caused extensive damage to the Van Wezel performing arts hall, which hosts the Sarasota Orchestra and the Sarasota Ballet, and all performances have been canceled until the beginning of the new year.
During the past few years, many snowbirds have delayed coming to Florida, choosing to return after hurricane season ends in late November. As a result, some performing arts groups are pushing back the start of their seasons to later in the year, said Richard Russell, general director of Sarasota Opera, where about 40% of season subscribers are snowbirds.
“If people for a couple of years delay coming back because of storm activity in late October, that may be the new pattern,” Russell said.
Owners of vacation homes outside Florida see opportunity in the Gulf Coast’s misfortune. Gary Sacks advertised his two-bedroom condo in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on the “Florida Snowbirds 2025” Facebook page less than a week after Milton made landfall, targeting those “whose plans for being a snowbird were impacted by the two hurricanes that hit Florida.” He didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
Jim Lenz, 96, who lives outside Dayton, Ohio, and spends the winter months in The Villages, a sprawling central Florida retirement community, believes the storms may give pause to some snowbirds’ winter plans, “particularly people who are older and may decide, ‘I don’t want to take that chance anymore.’”
“Some may give up on it. Others may decide, ‘We just can’t stand the cold up here and we are going down,’” Lenz said.
Some snowbirds like Joe Singer say the growing number and intensity of the storms aren’t going to keep them away. Singer, who has spent the past five winters in Parkland, Florida, instead of his native New Jersey, said he and other snowbirds are adapting by purchasing homes further inland or on higher ground and acquiring generators.
The winter months are “like a mini-heaven,” said Singer, who is an avid walker. “I get up in the morning and go walking. I don’t have to scrape ice off my windshield. I don’t have to shovel the sidewalk. It’s just been very, very nice.”
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Republicans in the Florida legislature on Monday delivered a humiliating rebuke to Ron DeSantis by shutting down the governor’s planned crackdown on immigration in the state and moving ahead with their own proposals.
Lawmakers in the Florida House and Senate abruptly “gaveled out” a special legislative session that DeSantis had called to seek their approval for measures he drew up in support of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
They included the appointment of a new state “immigration officer” who would be appointed by the governor to liaise with the White House, and report directly to him.
Republican Senate president Ben Albritton accused DeSantis of trying to usurp the legislature’s authority to write laws, and said the chambers would pursue their own immigration bill following the “spirit and letter” of the president’s immigration policies without the governor’s input.
“President Trump is clearly leading from the Oval Office and has everything under control. Sometimes leadership is not about being out in front. It’s about following the leaders you trust, and I trust President Trump,” Albritton said.
Trump previously praised DeSantis for calling the session in a post on Truth Social, but was on his golf course in Miami on Monday morning and had no immediate comment about the day’s developments.
The Miami Herald said the Republican lawmakers’ action amounted to a “kneecapping” for DeSantis, who previously commanded their absolute loyalty until his failed challenge to Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Daniel Perez, the Republican House speaker, had previously said that DeSantis’s early summoning of lawmakers to Tallahassee, and demands they approve his proposals ahead of the regular 60-day legislative session that begins next month, was “overreach”.
“We have the opportunity to move both expeditiously and thoughtfully. We do not have to choose between right now and getting it right,” he said on Monday.
Both Florida chambers were planning to come back into session on Monday afternoon to begin debating legislation expected to be introduced by Republican state senator Joe Gruters, who has been a vocal critic of DeSantis in the past.
Under his 75-page bill, there would still be a state immigration officer, but he would report to the legislature, and not to the governor. One name floated to fill the role is Wilton Simpson, the state’s agriculture commissioner, who has been tipped as a possible successor as governor in 2028, and who has had what observers describe as an “icy” relationship with DeSantis.
Among other measures, DeSantis had wanted to make it a state crime for undocumented migrants to enter Florida; sought to pressure local authorities and law enforcement to join in deportation purges; and end in-state university tuition rates for non-citizens.
He also wanted another expansion of his much-maligned unauthorized alien transport program (UATP), an “act of calculated deception” according to critics in which migrants were tricked onto buses and planes with false promises of accommodation and jobs, then dumped in Democratic states.
Immigration advocates criticized the position of both DeSantis and the Florida legislature on Monday.
“UnidosUS is deeply concerned by the state’s focus on immigration policies designed to posture for national political ambitions rather than address the urgent needs of Floridians,” the group’s Florida director Jared Nordlund said in a statement.
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“[They] serve primarily as a platform for advancing extreme immigration enforcement reminiscent of the Trump administration’s policies rather than being laser-focused on lowering the cost of living or increasing wages. DeSantis is choosing to ignore the economic crises he has created and is instead using the state as a testing ground for divisive immigration measures to bolster his political image.”
Over the weekend, a number of raids by federal immigration authorities took place in south Florida, with more than 950 arrested on Sunday, the Miami New Times reported.
In a further act of independence Monday, the Florida legislature voted almost unanimously to override DeSantis’s veto last year of large chunks of the state’s budget, the first such challenge to his financial authority since he took office in 2019. Among DeSantis’s cuts that angered both Democrats and Republicans was the near-wholesale stripping of the state’s arts budget.
In condemning the governor’s veto on Monday, Perez noted that over those six years, the legislature had increased funding for the executive office of the governor by 70%.
“This veto was at best a misunderstanding of the importance of the appropriation, or, at worst, an attempt to threaten the independence of our separate branch of government. Whatever the rationale, this Special Session represents the first opportunity to correct this veto,” Perez said, reported by Politico.
Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said in a post on Twitter/X that the abrupt ending of the session and budget rebuke had delivered “a small dose of democracy”.
“The Florida legislature just overrode Ron DeSantis’s veto of millions of dollars from the leg operating budget and gave him the middle finger for his BS special session call,” she wrote.
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On the latest episode of This Week in South Florida, host Glenna Milberg was joined by Florida State Sen. Jason Pizzo, attorney Linda Osberg-Braun, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Carlos Gimenez.
The full episode can be seen at the top of this page.
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