Orange County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday against a major development proposal for the Shingle Creek watershed, echoing two earlier decisions by the Development Review Committee and Planning and Zoning Commission last month.
RELATED: Orange County rejects Shingle Creek development proposal a second time
The proposed Tuscana development was controversial due to concerns about its likely environmental impacts, which ultimately weren’t resolved to the satisfaction of the county’s Environmental Protection Division. The county received more than 1,000 letters urging for the project to be denied.
But the county’s ultimate denial of the project is also not without controversy, namely from a group of area landowners who want to see the site developed, and argue the county’s denial constitutes a violation of their property rights.
During a designated public comment period at Tuesday’s commission meeting, 17 people spoke against the proposal, citing concerns about how the project would impact vulnerable wetlands, plant and wildlife species.
There are 64 wildlife species of concern living in the Shingle Creek watershed, according to a technical study commissioned by Orange County. The county is currently weighing whether to designate a Special Protection Area for the watershed.
“We can’t change what others have or haven’t done, and what wetlands have gone,” said Sunshine Grund, a Lake Nona resident who spoke at public comment Tuesday. “But we can protect the wetlands that still remain.”
Not just “swampland”
Meanwhile, representatives for the development team have insisted their plans for the site wouldn’t negatively impact wetlands or exacerbate area flooding, citing analyses and stormwater modeling by engineering firm Kimley-Horn.
“This actually improves the flooding situation,” Dan O’Keefe with Shutts & Bowen LLP said of the project Tuesday. “It provides more [compensatory flood] storage post-development than it does pre-development.”
For those behind the development proposal and area landowners who support it, the Tuscana project would be an improvement from what the site is like today. One property owner described it as a “wasteland,” where ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) and motorcycles run amuck.
“We would not have purchased [the land], had we known that it wouldn’t eventually get developed,” said one of those landowners, David Pedersen, speaking at Tuesday’s meeting. “The land was not in any protected wetland area or preservation area.”
That was back around 2009, Pedersen said, the year he bought land in the area where developers hoped to build the Tuscana project. But before buying the land, Pedersen and other landowners speaking in favor of the project Tuesday said they did their “due diligence,” looking into the area’s nearby plots and future land use designations.
“The owners of these properties did not just buy swampland,” said Kim Sewell Tuesday, speaking on behalf of the 176 landowners making up Shingle Creek Co-Owners, LLC. “This land is in the highest-density land use category in the county, and to this day, that designation has never changed.”
Ramón Pereira Bonilla with Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group, spoke against the project, citing flooding concerns. Still, he said he empathizes with the property owners who wanted to see it happen.
“I’ll be honest: my heart breaks for the people who bought this property … And they should seek recompensation, somehow, for being duped,” Pereira Bonilla said. “That does not mean that they should be able to build this land and make the lives of people who are living there worse, destroying the community and the environment.”
Pereira Bonilla said while he doesn’t support this specific project, neither he nor the organization he represents is against development in general.
“We think we need more urban infill. We need affordable housing. And this is the opposite of that, quite frankly,” Pereira Bonilla said.
After hearing from project applicants and members of the public — and allowing for a rebuttal from the applicant team — county commissioners had some discussion with the county’s legal counsel, including about the potential for legal concerns as a result of denying the project.
County Mayor Jerry Demings said the board had received a request for District 1 Commissioner Nicole Wilson and District 5 Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad to recuse themselves from voting on the project. The county’s legal team had a debrief with those commissioners, explaining what constitutes a “voting conflict” and that ultimately, the decision was up to them. Neither commissioner ultimately recused themselves.
“I would just like to be perfectly clear: I have no conflict of interest in this matter, and I also have the ability to be very fair in this hearing,” Martinez Semrad said. “The only thing I’m guilty of doing today is my job.”
Commissioners ultimately voted unanimously against the project.
