Applause broke out at Orange County Public Works this week when the county’s Development Review Committee voted 3-2 against a massive development proposal for the Shingle Creek wetlands area, which forms the headwaters of the Florida Everglades.
The DRC’s vote Wednesday to recommend denying the proposal doesn’t stop the Tuscana planned development project in its tracks. The proposal will still go before the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission on April 24. Final approval would come later, from the board of county commissioners.
Still, opponents of the project welcomed the committee’s vote, saying it signals the county is rightfully concerned about the Tuscana development’s potentially destructive environmental impacts.
The proposed Tuscana project would include nearly 1,300 hotel rooms and more than 4,800 multi-family apartment units, along with more than 650,000 square feet allocated for commercial activity. Engineers and consultants behind the proposal are requesting to rezone the area, currently designated for rural/agricultural use, to a planned development district.
Originally, the development team’s proposal to build in Shingle Creek was much larger. The initial application filed in January of 2022 called for 87 acres of direct impacts to wetlands, versus the 22 acres now expected to be affected, according to the latest version of the application.
Still, some county staff members and area residents remain concerned the project could have devastating consequences for the sensitive wetlands and surrounding watershed.
“Public Works has a lot of concerns with this development,” Deputy Public Works Director Susan Van Ussach said Wednesday. “It's supposed to be: right place, right development.”
But “this whole area, the majority of it, is in wetlands or floodplain,” Van Ussach said. “When Shingle Creek stages high, there's nowhere for it to go, besides the area that you're building on.”
On Wednesday, Orange County Planning Manager Alberto Vargas acknowledged the project team has improved its plan from the initial version submitted three years ago, including by recently removing a total 770 hotel and multi-family units from the proposal. But there are still problems, Vargas said.
The applicants, made up of a team that includes Kimley-Horn engineers and environmental consultants with Bio-Tech Consulting, are requesting several waivers from county regulations, including a maximum building height waiver to allow for buildings up to 200 feet high. That’s a big departure from the typical 60-foot maximum building height, Vargas said Wednesday.
“So it’s not double, but you’re above and beyond the double,” Vargas told the applicant team. “You do have a development program that … continues to be challenging in order to implement.”
Also weighing in at Wednesday’s meeting was the CLEO Institute’s Climate Resilience Manager Laura Betts, who serves on Orange County’s Sustainability Advisory Board and says she collectively spent about 16 years serving on two different planning commissions, in Wisconsin and Polk County.
Betts described the project’s waiver requests as “excessive and incompatible” with Orange Code, a reimagining of the county’s current development guidelines slated to take effect this summer.
“These waivers are not minor adjustments,” Betts said. “These are extreme, fundamentally misaligned with Orange County's planning policies, and set a dangerous precedent for future development and environmentally sensitive lands.”
Most of the wetland impacts currently anticipated by the proposal would not come from the development itself, but rather from the construction of a road providing access from Westwood Boulevard to the development, project applicants emphasized Wednesday.
Two roadway access points for the project are necessary to ensure public safety, according to county staff. Initially resistant to the idea of building two roads, project applicants are now open to it. But even still, the county’s Environmental Protection Division doesn’t approve of the project as currently designed.
Attempts to interview Bio-Tech Consulting President John Miklos following Wednesday’s denial recommendation were unsuccessful, but Miklos previously spoke with Central Florida Public Media after another committee meeting held early last month.
“The county's literally talking out of both sides of their mouth,” Miklos said on March 5. “They told us to move all of the development up to the north on Westwood [Boulevard]; then they told us to move it down because it was too much wetland impact.”
“Now it's not urban enough,” Miklos said. “It’s difficult to find a middle ground.”
"When Shingle Creek stages high, there's nowhere for it to go, besides the area that you're building on."Orange County Public Works Deputy Director Susan Van Ussach
Miklos previously chaired the St. Johns River Water Management District, a position he held while simultaneously heading up Bio-Tech Consulting. On Wednesday, he told committee members the level of detail being requested for the project at this stage was “extremely problematic.”
“We're willing to make any accommodations we can as we go forward, as we get to engineering and get to some of these details,” Miklos said. “What is being asked of us at this level is not necessarily fair.”
Meanwhile, Vargas emphasized there are key areas where the proposal needs more work.
“Where I have problems, from a planning's perspective, is the actual development program. The specifics,” Vargas said. “The mix of uses, both in density and intensity that is being presented to us — that for it to be achieved, it's requiring all of these waivers to be put in place.”
“Our analysis is not based on: take all of these buildings and shove them to the north,” Vargas said. “Our analysis is: let's look at the specific buildings themselves.”
Tuscana was the last item on Wednesday’s agenda, closing out a five-and-a-half hour long committee meeting at Public Works. The Planning & Zoning meeting scheduled for April 24 will be held at the county’s main administration building.
