LAUREN RITCHIE: Tangerine turns wary eye to future.
Nancy McDonald got married 32 years ago in the community church in Tangerine, which was marking its centennial at the time.
She always wished the church fathers would have let her ring the bells to celebrate the marriage, but rules were strict back then.
McDonald and her husband David, now 59, immediately settled themselves on the shores of Lake Ola in this historic northwest Orange County hamlet to raise their three children, now 30, 28 and 19. Civic-minded grownups helped keep their tiny corner of Orange on track through the Tangerine Improvement Society — no homeowner association needed — and kids got to grow up in that blessed state called “rural living.”
“They would die if we ever sold this property,” said Nancy, 57. “They think they’re going to bring those grandbabies home to raise them here — those nonexistent grandbabies.”
Get on it, McDonald offspring! Orange County officials are poised to wipe your pretty little homestead off the map so some developer can create a cheap facsimile of the rich community that exists for real right now.
The irony is so sharp it hurts.
Residents in unincorporated Tangerine, spread over several miles, are fighting a change in Orange’s growth plan to allow 280 apartments of any type rather than the senior living apartments dictated by an earlier agreement. They also don’t want stores instead of the offices that were supposed to be built on 64 acres north of the Stoneybrook Hills Village Publix on U.S. Highway 441 on the border with Lake County, just south of Mount Dora.
The likes of planning experts and even County Commissioner Bryan Nelson, who represents that district, don’t see the big deal in changing the type of apartments that the proposed development would serve and letting the owner, Tim Bailey, turn the cow pasture into stores rather than offices. Their viewpoint is that growth is coming, and it can be managed but not stopped — regardless of what an agreement that now is seven years old has to say about how this one piece of property should be used.
“You can’t say that we’re going to hold back somebody for 40 years based on something they said a long time ago,” said Nelson, who’s running for Apopka mayor.