The cost of commuting by car isn’t just about dollars and cents. There’s also the cost of time: like time spent waiting in traffic, or trying to find ways to avoid it.
For some 200 people protesting in the Serenoa Lakes neighborhood of Four Corners one Saturday in late March, time was top of mind. Their complaint? The absence of a promised roadway connection to Orange County, right next door.
As of late April, Lake County is almost done building its portion of the road connection project, on Sawgrass Bay Boulevard. That should be finished by May, according to county officials. But construction on Orange County’s Flemings Road, to which Sawgrass Bay will ultimately connect, has yet to start.
Meanwhile, some Lake County residents like Jim White claim they’ve spent more than 10 years waiting for the roadway connection.
“They said it’d be a year in 2013,” said White, referencing the year he said he bought his home in Serenoa Lakes. “They lied to us.”
It was the developers and home builders who lied, White said — never in writing. But other residents kept photos they took of signs advertising the would-be road in several of the development’s neighborhoods. In Serenoa Lakes, one sign promised a complete connection by January 2026.
Even though that deadline is still some nine months away, residents are concerned it’s becoming increasingly out of reach — especially because Orange County still has yet to start construction on Flemings.
The two counties’ project timelines are out of sync, underscoring a challenge often facing the unincorporated Four Corners area where Lake, Orange, Osceola and Polk counties intersect.
It is one of the fastest-growing areas in the state, Census data show. Yet Four Corners has no unified governance structure, a side effect of its complex jurisdictional landscape, according to a recent report from the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council. Last year, the RPC received a state grant to partner with all four counties on developing a strategic plan to address future growth.
That regional growth, and associated rising traffic demands, is what prompted Lake and Orange counties to sign an interlocal agreement to collaborate on necessary roadway improvements.
“We are growing into each other,” said Lake County Public Works Engineering Director Jeffrey Earhart.
The 2017 agreement identifies a need including a new roadway network to link Orange and Lake counties together at three defined connection points. The pending Flemings-Sawgrass connection is one of them.
Residents say the additional roads would also likely reduce traffic in the surrounding area, like Osceola’s infamously congested Route 192. Whether that turns out to be the case remains to be seen; research indicates as road capacity expands, congestion actually tends to get worse.
For Orange County, the interlocal agreement presented a new and unique challenge, according to Transportation Planning Division Manager Brian Sanders.
Original plans for Horizon West in southwest Orange County, one of the county’s fastest-growing areas, had never contemplated a connection to Lake County. Now, officials would have to break the news to developers already working from those initial plans.
“It took us some time to explain the dynamics of a high-volume road that would now split their community,” Sanders said. “So they took some time to get their arms around it, to make sure it made financial sense for them to do that.”
It’s been nearly 10 years now, and the developers and Orange County are still trying to get the project to make financial sense. The “race right now,” Sanders wrote in an April 24 email, is to finalize a second amendment to a road network agreement Orange County originally signed in 2020.
More than a dozen entities owning parcels of land in the area, including along Flemings Road, signed that initial agreement. But since then, some entities have sold interests and parts of parcels, complicating right-of-way acquisitions and other logistics required for construction to begin.
Regardless of when it does ultimately start, road construction will last about 18 months, according to Sanders. Based on that timeline, if construction were to start in July, the soonest Flemings Road would be done is January 2027: a year after the timeline promised by the signs in Serenoa Lakes, and what residents say is more than a decade after they first heard talk of the road.
A “road to nowhere”
When Kyle Glanton’s family bought their new-build home in Serenoa Lakes two years ago, it was with the roadway connection in mind.
“We chose that specific location because of the promise [of] the connection to Orlando,” Glanton said.
Without the connection in place, driving to Downtown Orlando takes around 30 minutes longer than it otherwise would, Glanton said. And even though he and his neighbors can see Disney World’s nightly fireworks from where they live, actually getting to the theme park can take 45 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic.
That’s why, up until last year, Glanton and some other community members were taking advantage of a makeshift shortcut: the Sawgrass-Flemings connection, in all its rural, unfinished glory. Since a small section of the route was unpaved at that point, it was mostly folks with Jeeps and other larger vehicles — the “dirty tire crew” — braving the road, Glanton said.
“They were calling it the Disney cut-through,” Glanton said.
But as word of the shortcut kept spreading, eventually, “no trespassing” signs went up, Glanton said. So did cement barricades, set up by officials in both counties to prevent drivers from accessing the unfinished roadway connection. It’s a question of human safety, along with the integrity of the road itself, according to Sanders with Orange County, who called the shortcut “problematic.”
“There’s vehicles getting stuck. They may be going on private property. More vehicles are coming onto our road than, structurally, it can handle,” Sanders said.
The cement blockades on Lake County’s side have since come down, as the county wraps up its end of construction. But the Orange County barricades remain in place, to the chagrin of many of Glanton’s neighbors.
“A lot of my [neighbors], they want to see us go ahead and allow the road to be used in its current state,” Glanton said. “I’m a little more open to being more patient than that. I would like to just go ahead and see the actual construction on Orange County’s side take place.”
As it stands, with the counties’ construction timelines out of sync, the roadway connection will likely remain in a half-finished state for some time.
“It's going to just be the road to nowhere, essentially,” Glanton said.
“Recipe for disaster”
Orange County recently contracted a geotechnical consultant to examine how structurally stable Flemings Road is in its current state. Those test results, due in the coming weeks, should help determine whether or not the road could be safely reopened to local traffic.
Meanwhile, area residents have safety concerns of their own. Until the connection is finished, for some neighborhoods nestled towards the back of the sprawling development community, there is only one way in and one way out.
The lack of access to Flemings as an emergency exit has already created problems for some residents: like Esterling and Gabriela Lantigua, whose four-year-old daughter nearly died last fall when she fell into a pool and legally drowned, according to her parents.
Had they been able to access the roadway connection, emergency responders said they would’ve been able to get to the scene much more quickly, Esterling said: “That was the first thing that came out of their mouths … They would have been there within the minute mark, or even less.”
But without the road, it took seven to eight minutes for emergency responders to arrive on scene. “If it wasn't for my sister being there and knowing how to do CPR, I would have lost [my daughter],” Gabriela said.
Even before the drowning scare, the Lantiguas said, they’d considered the possibility of an emergency — like a hurricane, flood or fire — prompting a bottleneck situation, with too many cars all trying to leave the community at once, from the same exit point.
“And surprise, surprise, we ran into an emergency,” Esterling said.
Fortunately, the Lantiguas’ daughter recovered well from the incident, with no lasting health complications, according to her parents. Still, the harrowing experience left a mark. And the Lantiguas aren’t alone. Other residents have shared their own personal stories of distress, exacerbated by the incomplete roadway connection.
Better access to critical services in Orlando was “literally the reason that we moved here,” said Rachel Brymer, who moved into the community with her husband last year. But after giving birth to her first child last July, Brymer found herself in an emergency situation, she said, dealing with postpartum preeclampsia and severe postpartum edema in her legs.
Brymer and her husband headed to the hospital in Downtown Orlando where she gave birth, AdventHealth. “By the time we got there, I ended up collapsing outside of my car,” Brymer said. “It was very scary.”
Had they arrived at the hospital even 10 minutes sooner, Brymer said, she thinks things would have been different: “I wouldn’t have that traumatic, postpartum memory.”
Today, without the roadway connection in place, the Brymers and Lantiguas continue living with a sense of unease about what could happen if another emergency unfolds.
“Knowing that I live in a community [where] I have literally just one exit?” Esterling said. “It’s just a recipe for disaster.”
Building new roads: a long and winding road
Officials with both Lake and Orange counties insist they understand how important the roadway connection project is, and are prioritizing its completion. They also say building a new road is never an easy feat.
“This is a very dynamic area of the county, very fast-growing,” said Sanders with Orange County. “And we're producing as quickly as humanly possible.”
Understanding why residents are impatient for the road to come to fruition, the reality is that so far, progress on Flemings Road is pretty much on track with other road projects in Orange County, according to Sanders.
“The [county’s] roadway program, if uninterrupted, takes about eight years: two years for the study, two years for the design, two years for the right-of-way acquisition, and then two years for the construction of the project,” Sanders said. “Today, we're sitting at year five.”
A right-of-way is a type of easement that provides access to a piece of property while road construction is underway. Typically, Orange County won’t start the right-of-way acquisition process until the road design phase is complete.
But for Flemings Road, the county’s been working on both phases simultaneously in an effort to expedite the process, the county’s deputy administrator Jon Weiss said at an April 9 meeting of Orange County’s Roadway Agreements Committee.
“Unfortunately, because of some of the technical complexities, because of the right-of-way interests, there's been some challenges,” Weiss said. “But we are, I think, pretty close to a schedule today that almost mirrors what was originally contemplated back in 2020.”
Still, some residents remain skeptical, saying it feels like developers are holding the reins on a critical community infrastructure project. Lake County resident Deborah Running said as much during a RAC meeting in late March, for which an agenda item to discuss the pending Flemings connection was pulled, following property owners’ last-minute request.
“Orange and Lake counties have agreed on this connection for years. They approved new residential developments in the Serenoa and Flemings neighborhoods, fully aware that there would be an increase in local traffic,” said Deborah Running.
At the April 9 RAC meeting, Weiss acknowledged the road network agreement hadn’t panned out exactly as expected. He said it is likely the most difficult such agreement county staff have worked on in Horizon West.
“It's twice as long, and it seems four times as complicated as any of the other agreements that we've had to manage,” Weiss said. “Ultimately, [in] this agreement, we did some things that we probably shouldn’t have.”
Orange County allowed for some deviation from Horizon West’s typical development requirements, “specifically to provide for the improvements to Flemings Road and to get that connection to Lake County,” Weiss said.
A “chicken or egg” conundrum
Even with less complicated arrangements involving fewer property owners, it’s still often developers holding the key to getting new roads built. Part of that’s simply because roads are for getting from point A to point B, with developed property often serving as destinations.
“The need for the road isn't really there until the developer wants to develop the adjacent land and the land around it,” said Lake County Construction Inspection Supervisor Terry Scott. “Unfortunately, that's when [the road] gets constructed … The developer drives that need.”
Developers also help drive the pace of road construction, because on their own, local governments often simply can’t afford the massive price of building new roads. That’s especially true given today’s road construction costs, which are significantly inflated, according to the Federal Highway Administration: outpacing the more general rate of inflation reflected by the Consumer Price Index.
Between design, right-of-way acquisition and construction, Orange County roads cost roughly $4.54 million per lane mile, according to a 2020 study prepared for the county. That’s where developers come in, according to Sanders.
“The development community plays a unique role. They're able to finance these projects well ahead of Orange County's collections of impact fees,” Sanders said. That’s because developers of large projects, like this one in the Four Corners, typically have partners with the financial backing necessary for funding road projects immediately, once they’re approved.
But changes are still pending for Orange County’s road network agreement with the cluster of landowner entities near the development, some of which are still being chased down to sign the amended agreement. Construction on Flemings Road can’t begin until all those necessary signatures are collected.
Once all the signatures are in, county staff will immediately request the board of county commissioners to approve the amended agreement at its next available meeting, Sanders said, while noting it generally takes at least a month to get on the agenda.
For many local governments in the United States, it’s challenging to fund road projects. But it can be an especially daunting task in Florida, where property tax restrictions significantly limit communities’ ability to grow revenue, according to Adam Carr, a project manager with Urban3. The urban planning firm helps cities and counties understand the role of land use and development patterns on local governments’ long-term financial health.
The Sunshine State is not alone in offering residents a homestead exemption. But Florida’s low cap on how much a home’s assessed value can grow — either 3% or Consumer Price Index, whichever is less — does make Florida “fairly extreme,” Carr said.
Here in Carr’s home state of Florida, “there is this constraint on revenue growth for communities, [which] costs associated with maintenance and operations of infrastructure systems don't necessarily have,” Carr said.
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In a sense, then, roads are an unfunded utility, Carr said.
“At least in our current development paradigm, everybody is using roads for transportation and getting around. But it’s not often directly funded by local governments in the same way that a water utility or sewer utility might be,” with usage fees, Carr said.
Instead, in order to fund road projects like Flemings, local governments rely heavily on tax revenues; namely, property taxes, especially given Florida’s lack of a state income tax.
“Because property taxes are such a foundational piece of how local governments pay for these types of things, the amount of revenue that properties generate is directly associated with … the quality of roads that you might see in a given area,” Carr said.
"Roads cost a lot of money, and a lot of our money goes into keeping the existing roads working. There's not a lot of new roads that are not developer-driven."Jeff Earhart, Lake County Public Works Engineering Director
Without being able to raise property taxes, that revenue stream is limited. Roads are largely funded by impact fees, paid by developers to local governments as a condition for being allowed to develop in the first place. But since those are one-time fees, they won’t cover the cost of long-term road maintenance needs, like resurfacing — and, eventually, rebuilding, according to a report produced by Urban3 last year for 1000 Friends of Florida.
Earhart with Lake County describes developers’ role in road construction as a dynamic not unlike the proverbial “chicken and the egg,” especially with road construction costs now skyrocketing from inflation. In the early 2000s, one project bid Earhart made came back at $2.5 million; today, the cost is up to $8 million, he said.
“Roads cost a lot of money, and a lot of our money goes into keeping the existing roads working,” Earhart said, adding that in Lake County, “there's not a lot of new roads that are not developer-driven.”
Lake County isn’t part of the roadway network agreement between Orange County and property owners, and is therefore limited in its power to help expedite work on Flemings Road. But Earhart came to Orange County’s March 26 RAC meeting to express his support for the project.
“I just want to thank everyone for working together with us,” Earhart said, addressing committee members during a public comment period. “We're very anxious to make the connection happen between Lake and Orange County.”
Making time for what matters most
Glanton shifted to an earlier work schedule because of the unfinished Flemings-Sawgrass Bay connection, to reduce how much time he spends sitting in traffic. Now, Glanton leaves his house each day around 4:45 a.m. to get to his job in East Orlando, long before the crack of dawn. It still takes him about an hour to get there.
The biggest downside? Glanton barely ever gets to see his four-year-old daughter, Kennedy — at least, not in person. The highlight of Glanton’s day is their daily video call around 7:30 a.m., shortly after he gets to work.
“It’s the closest we can get to a substitute for the real thing,” Glanton said after one of those daily chats one morning in March. “These moments, they don’t come back.”
Glanton and his wife originally thought of having more children, but are now leaning against it. partly due to the lack of a roadway connection that would make so many aspects of their daily lives easier.
“I just don't see how we could do it,” Glanton said. As it stands, Glanton’s mom moved into their home full-time to help care for Kennedy, at least for as long as Glanton has to work the earlier schedule.
That March morning, Kennedy told Glanton she felt extra sad to wake up without him that day: “I was crying when I was missing Daddy,” she said through the phone.
“Yeah, I'm sorry, darling,” Glanton said. “Soon we'll get back to normal, hopefully.”
