Bio
Casey Colburn founded The Colburn Firm, PL in April 2013 and serves as principal and special project counsel in cases involving federal, state and local government, and quasi-governmental issues. His practice involves obtaining and addressing approvals, legislation & codes, permitting, zoning, land use & development matters; green building & regulation; waterfront & docks; environmental permitting & due diligence. After nearly twenty-years of concentration primarily in the area of shopping center real estate, environmental and land use law, Colburn’s dedication to environmental & economic sustainability in his community led him to put his knowledge to work as an attorney for Economic Recovery Group, where he dedicated himself to helping both his own clients and, acting as co-counsel, helping dozens of other Florida law firms’ clients to navigate the very challenging BP Claims process, the results of which are returning tens of millions of recovered capital back into Florida’s economy.
Casey serves as an advisor to Communities for Veterans, a Sarasota-based collaboration developing continuum of care facilities for US Veterans that’s been responsible for the development and construction of hundreds of thousands of market rate and affordable multi‐family housing units, independent senior communities and assisted living facilities throughout 25 states. He is also a principal in the political consulting firm, Crane & Tide, LLC.
Casey received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona in 1991. He received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1994. He was a founding director of the Sarasota Young Professionals Group and IMPACT, and he serves as a director and volunteer in numerous civic and charitable causes. In addition to Chairing the Downtown Sarasota Alliance, Casey also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Suncoast Community Capital. He previously served multiple terms as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota, and as counsel and director to The Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, and other civic and public bodies. Casey is an active member of the Government Affairs Committees of the both the Gulf Coast Builders Exchange and the International Council of Shopping Centers. He serves on ICSC’s National Environment Committee.
Throughout his career, Casey has centered his transactional and advisory practice on facilitating the sustainable use and utilization of real property, forestland and market-based land conservation. Casey’s experience in the sensible use and re-use of lands is unique due to the early and very hands-on role he assumed for his clients in advancing novel environmental clean-ups, effectuating green building projects, and addressing challenging entitlement and land use situations on their behalf. Throughout his career, which has spanned the United States and Puerto Rico, Casey has regularly employed pioneering methods and professionals to make possible his clients’ acquisition and redevelopment of environmentally-challenged “brownfields” for reuse as major retail and shopping center projects. He’s helped to make more sustainable their assessment, acquisition, maintenance, and also their preservation of productive forestland and family lands. Most recently, he’s very proud to have helped the country finally make good on a decade-old promise to US veterans, securing approvals to utilize several sprawling VA Campuses across the country to house and care for disabled, aged, and homeless US veterans.
The successes and challenges experienced on behalf of Casey’s clients over the decades has yielded enduring relationships of shared professional experience and a network, to which Casey is a proud contributor, that’s also a deep and broad reservoir of go-to talent, from which Casey regularly draws, that’s ready and eager to make his clients’ aspirations a reality.
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