Palmetto Mayor Dan West has only been in office for seven months but he’s spent his whole life in Palmetto and watched it shift from an agriculture-based community to a rapidly growing city with a variety of new businesses, drawing new residents from across the country. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, West has seen Palmetto grow at a very fast rate, as families from Northern states looked for a new home where they could spend more time outside. “It’s no wonder people are moving to Palmetto. It’s such a close-knit community, it still has that small-town charm. We want to keep that,” West says. To keep this small town charm, West has taken a number of steps to renovate and develop community centers. 14th Avenue Park, currently an empty lot situated at the heart of the city, is in its final design stages and will feature new pickleball and basketball courts, a playground and a wide grassy area for locals to picnic or exercise. The Palmetto Woman’s Club, a historic gathering space first built in 1930, is currently under renovation, which will maintain its original architecture and be offered as an event space for the community when finished. While West is aiming to maintain these historic community spaces, he is also working with the Manatee Chamber of Commerce to bring in new businesses. “We’ve worked closely with Palmetto on several initiatives that seek to attract and retain businesses within the city. Palmetto has seen some impactful opportunities over the last several years,” President and Chief Executive Officer of the Manatee Chamber of Commerce, Jacki Dezelski, says. West says Palmetto, established as a town in 1868 and incorporated as a city in 1897, needs some structural improvements. “We just need to increase our capacity, so we can take care of the needs of the citizens,” he says. The city recently completed a $45 million expansion of Palmetto High School, aiming to increase capacity as more families move to the area. As the city’s popularity grows, West says he has seen more housing built outside of the city limits as more families move to the suburbs nearby. Parrish even welcomed a new high school—Parrish Community High School—in 2019 to accommodate the growing population. In the fall of 2027, Parrish will also welcome a new State College of Florida campus. “The residents and the students in this area of Manatee County needed it and were anxious for us to expand. We hope to make the educational opportunities that we provide more accessible to locals, because traffic in this region has greatly increased over the last 10 years,” SCF President Tommy Gregory says about the new campus. West looks forward to welcoming new residents and continuing to develop the city to meet locals’ needs. “There’s not a place in Florida that’s not growing. For years, people kept going further south, to Naples and Fort Myers. Finally, they started seeing what we had to offer here in Palmetto and Manatee County. They saw the charm of the area and what a great place it is to raise a family,” West says. —C.Mould