Lake supports new Wekiva interchange
Lake County commissioners threw their support Tuesday behind efforts for another interchange on the $1.6 billion Wekiva Parkway despite opposition from conservationists and other Central Florida elected officials.
“We’re trying to protect the Mount Plymouth community from becoming a superhighway,” Commissioner Leslie Campione said after the board unanimously approved a resolution for a permanent connection to the parkway at County Road 435.
The master plan for the longdebated toll road calls for temporary on-off ramps at C.R. 435 to close when highway work is done. The plan lays out three primary interchanges in the 25-mile elevated stretch of highway that will complete a tolled loop around Metro Orlando: at West Kelly Park Road in northwest Orange County, State Road 46 in east Lake County and near Interstate 4 and State Road 417 in Seminole County.
The prospect of a fourth permanent interchange came to light ear-
lier this month, and last week, the Apopka City Council members voted to oppose the idea. Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer sent Lake commissioners a letter, urging them to reject it.
“The existing plan was reached after years of research and consideration by the Wekiva River Basin Coordinating Committee and achieves the goal of constructing the much-needed Wekiva Parkway while protecting environmentally sensitive lands by keeping development away from the Wekiva River Basin,” he said in the letter.
Kilsheimer disagreed with Campione’s view that Apopka residents would snake through Mount Plymouth by way of C.R. 435 as a shortcut to either the S.R. 46 or the Kelly Park Road interchanges.
He said he thinks most motorists would hop on the parkway at Kelly Park Road if they want to travel to Interstate 4, Orlando Sanford International Airport or other eastern destinations in Central Florida.
“They’re going to avoid that windy road,” he said of C.R. 435, a narrow two-lane that bisects Mount Plymouth, a rural community of about 4,000 people. The road has signs urging motorists to be alert for golf carts.
Seminole County Commissioner Lee Constantine, who led the coordinating commission that carefully crafted the legislation creating the parkway, vowed to fight any effort to amend it to allow another interchange.
Charles Lee, director of Advocacy for Florida Audubon, called the idea “a bad one.”
Orange County Commissioner Bryan Nelson plans to bring up the idea “for discussion only” at a Nov. 14 commission meeting.
Campione, meanwhile, rebutted suggestions that a new interchange is a ruse to spur additional development in east Lake and northeast Orange counties.
“This is not about opening up [parkway access] for commercial uses or more residential uses,” she said.
“I want to be really clear … [this is] just a way we can bypass traffic so it doesn’t go right through the Mount Plymouth community, which is essentially a neighborhood.”
The resolution contends a C.R. 435 interchange “would not negatively impact conservation land, open space and other environmental resources due to the protections already in place” in the Wekiva legislation and Lake County’s comprehensive land-use plan.
Changing the Wekiva Parkway plan would require several difficult steps, including persuading lawmakers to amend the law approved more than a decade ago.