Orange County District 5 Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad has a proposal she said could potentially help the county preserve more natural land — without attracting more scrutiny from the state.
The county could ask the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to designate more local sites as bird sanctuaries or restricted hunting areas, Martinez Semrad said at Tuesday’s commission meeting.
“Given that we are being preempted on the local level, I'm trying to use the state laws to help us,” Martinez Semrad told her colleagues Tuesday.
Her proposal comes in the wake of a new state law that restricts local governments’ planning powers, Senate Bill 180. Earlier this year, state regulators cited the law to stop Orange County from implementing its brand-new comprehensive plan, Vision 2050. Staff spent nearly 10 years working on the plan, which state officials deemed “null and void” under the new law.
Recently, Orange County signed onto a lawsuit challenging SB 180, joining dozens of other cities and counties. Mayor Jerry Demings and fellow commissioners had previously promised they’d defend the county’s home rule power.
On Tuesday, Demings said the county would need to take several additional steps — and gather community input — before formally exploring the potential to seek new state-level protections for county land. Regardless, Demings said, right now the county already has too much on its plate to be able to prioritize the idea.
“We're being consumed with a lot of extraordinary work that is compounding what the county attorney is doing, what county administration is doing,” Demings said.
Along with the pending SB 180 lawsuit, Orange County and other local governments are facing more surveillance from the state. Beginning in August, Florida’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, audited Orange County. Later, state officials accused county staff of tampering with records during that DOGE audit — an allegation the county vehemently denies.
“We still have a pending DOGE review, and at this point, they have now narrowed it to deposing — I think it's four staff members?” Demings said Tuesday. “We don't know where that stuff is going to take us.”
RELATED: Florida CFO issues 16 subpoenas to Orange County staff related to DOGE investigation
One thing is for certain, Martinez Semrad said: Orange County residents love the environment and want to protect it.
“What we know in Orange County is that anything that goes green on the ballot — our voters, they respect it, they want it, and they want to engage with it,” Martinez Semrad said.
In recent years, county voters have overwhelmingly approved protections for rural areas and Split Oak Forest.
RELATED: Why the Florida Wildlife Corridor couldn't save Split Oak Forest
Beyond helping preserve more land and protect wildlife, Martinez Semrad said, having more bird sanctuaries and restricted hunting areas in the county could also help boost ecotourism.
“When the visitors come, so do their tourist receipts. They spend money in the restaurants. They spend money in the hotels,” she said. “So it is worth protecting these endemic populations with an economic value, as well.”
Martinez Semrad said she was pitching the idea to her colleagues now, due to an approaching January deadline for FWC to review applications from local governments. But that timeline is too tight, according to staff with the county’s legal department and Demings. He said the county simply doesn’t have bandwidth to prioritize Martinez Semrad’s request.
“To be quite honest about it, there are some things simmering right now that we're going to have to address. I know what they are, and our staff knows what they are, and I'm not trying to complicate it for us,” Demings said, “because then we dilute our ability to be nimble, to adjust to a changing environment.”
Demings gave county staff the go-ahead Tuesday to do some preliminary research on state-designated bird sanctuaries and restricted hunting areas, with a focus on what’s worked in other jurisdictions and the cost of enforcement for local governments. Although he didn’t give a specific timeline, Demings said the board could likely revisit the matter “sometime after the first of the year.”
