The City of Sarasota will host a celebration for the recently completed Lido Beach renourishment project at 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 27. Officials, project stakeholders and the general public will gather on the beach near the newly renovated Lido Pavilion at 400 Benjamin Franklin Drive to mark the conclusion of the project, a partnership between the City and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nearly 700,000 cubic yards of recycled sand was added to a 1.56-mile stretch of Lido Key, from the public beach at the north end of the key to Ted Sperling Park at South Lido. The sand placement extended the beach by an average of 300 feet, or the length of a football field; contractor Cottrell Contracting Corporation also built two groins along South Lido that utilize nearly 5,000 tons of armor stone to interrupt or trap the flow of sand and reduce erosion.

The cost of the $12.68 million project was shared by the city, the state of Florida and the Army Corps. Officially known as the Lido Key Hurricane and Storm Damage Reduction Project, it represents the start of a 50-year partnership with the Army Corps that will allow the city to respond more quickly to future storms and erosion with renourishments anticipated on a five-year cycle. The city also partnered with Sarasota County, which provided a staging area for the project at Ted Sperling Park, and with Mote Marine Laboratory, Audubon Florida and Dial Cordy and Associates, which conducted sea turtle and shorebird monitoring before, during and after the construction.