CAUSEWAY: Local man donating playground equipment and more

Causeway Park may be renamed after the late wife of a Sarasota man who is donating playground equipment and other amenities to improve it.

The park, at least for the next 55 years, would be called Eloise Werlin Causeway Park. The name change was suggested by Ernest “Doc” Werlin, who is donating about $125,000 in park improvements for the open area at the base of the John Ringling Causeway. The City Commission voted unanimously last Monday to accept the donation, with the name change would be ratified at a later date.

Werlin, a Herald-Tribune finance columnist, plans to add to the park a small playground, a shade shelter for visitors and landscaping. He said it would be an honor if the city named the park after his wife.

“She so much enjoyed Sarasota in the few years that she was allowed to live here before she passed away,” Werlin said. “I thought that in helping make the park an inviting place, I can help the community. Hopefully, in a success mode, and others will follow my lead.”

The proposal was worked out in detail with Sarasota parks and recreation staff and endorsed by City Manager Tom Barwin. “This park is a little tired and needs some refreshing,” Barwin said.

The park’s new name would be in effect for 55 years — the lifetime of Werlin’s children, as he put it — at which time the city could decide to change it again or leave it in place. Werlin said he plans to employ architects to arrange the improvements at the park, and will set up a $50,000 endowment with the Gulf Coast Community Foundation to maintain it, thus sparing the city the expense.

Werlin said he chose Causeway Park because he lives nearby, and because it is small enough that he could make a difference in it.

The City Commission noted that Sarasota does not have a policy for changing the names of parks or other public properties, and directed staff to formulate one.

Even seemingly innocuous name changes have been controversial here in the past. In 2008, confusion over a state measure designating — but not renaming — the causeway as the “Gil Waters Bridge,” in honor of a Sarasota man who led the grassroots effort to get it built, led to outcry among residents.

Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune