Local View: Ban road from Split Oak in perpetuity.
The Central Florida Expressway Authority should heed growing push-back — including by the Florida League of Women Voters — to its proposed road alignment that would violate the Split Oak Forest Wildlife Environmental Area and further imperil its rare wildlife habitat and populations. In 2012, environmental agencies, both state and federal, cited the highest level of threat to resources by such a road near or in Split Oak and recommended the road stop at Narcoossee Road.
These agencies made the good point that an Osceola Parkway extension would only fuel more development and degrade resources in that environmentally fragile place.
This road plan serves two entities: Deseret Ranches and Tavistock Development Co., not residents. Opponents of an expressway through Split Oak know that no “deal” with tradeoff lands is worth trashing a crucial preserve. Such would flout not just this park’s original pact but entire mitigation and long-term conservation principles under Preservation 2000/Florida Forever.
This park is not Tavistock’s or the Mormon Church’s, but ours. For a public agency to force roads over public land against public will for private gain is wrong. The Linear Facility Statute states: “Owners and operators of linear facilities must avoid location on natural resource lands unless no other practical and prudent alternative is available.” An “E-1” alignment option that meets this standard not only skirts Split Oak but also the Lake Ajay community. Choose it.
A complex overlay of easements with multiple partners was put on Split Oak in the 1990s to protect it from encroachment and expressly to offset rare habitat and species loss on development sites. It became a mitigation bank. It is no small thing to undo this pact, just to appease two developers.
It’s an ugly precedent. Split Oak helps save gopher tortoises, indigo snakes, scrub jays, Sherman’s fox squirrel, wood storks, burrowing owls and panthers from piecemeal extinction. To “mitigate” for razing mitigation lands would be both crazy and a shrewd sleight of hand.
If this road runs over the Split Oak Forest Wildlife Environmental Area, we can’t trust any conservation promise and the original park deal was a hoax by Orange and Osceola counties. Even those lesservalue “trade” parcels proffered by the expressway authority are prey to easement undo like the acres now in its sights.
Split Oak is an official gopher tortoise recipient site, meaning, under GT Management Plan permitting rules, permanent. So, there is a real public trust issue here and a threat to numerous listed species.
It’s time for public agencies to serve us, not just growth. Ban this road from Split Oak: in perpetuity.