Universal turned down $100K county discount
Orange County was willing to cut Universal Orlando a $100,000 break — but the giant resort turned it down.
The episode involved a $10 million “economic incentive” program that Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and county commissioners launched last summer, in which the county’s building department agreed to slash permit fees. The hope was that the discounted permits would spur residential and commercial construction work, and help soften the economic impact
of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The discounts were capped at $100,000 per project. And Universal, which is doing early infrastructure work for its future Epic Universe theme park, would have easily qualified for the maximum break.
But Universal opted not to accept it.
“We had already made the commitment to develop Epic Universe and felt this program would more appropriately be used to encourage other projects,” said Tom Schroder, a spokesman for Universal.
Universal is owned by Comcast Corp., the cable-and-entertainment giant that turned a $10.5 billion profit last year despite the pandemic.
Some other big companies chose to pocket the savings. Records show aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which turned a $6.8 billion profit last year, accepted $100,000 in permit discounts related to construction work around the company’s Missiles and Fire Control Campus on Sand Lake Road.
A spokeswoman for Lockheed would not say whether Lockheed would not have gone forward with its construction if it had to pay the full permit fees.
“By partnering with state and local governments on economic development opportunities, Lockheed Martin remains competitive to our customers, provides critical products for the warfighter and valuable
career opportunities in the Orlando community,” Lockheed spokeswoman Brittny Sherlock said.
Orange County launched the permit discounts in July, with plans to continue them for six months or until it had issued $10 million worth of discounts, whichever came first.
The program emerged from discussions between county officials and an assortment of real-estate industry interests — from lobbying groups representing homebuilders, apartment developers and contractors, as well as individual companies ranging from Lake Nona developer Tavistock to national homebuilders like Mattamy Homes, Meritage Homes and Toll Brothers.
Altogether, records show the county discounted permits for more than 22,000 projects in all — most of them for small jobs where the permits cost less
than $500.
Ten projects banked the maximum $100,000 in savings. In addition to Lockheed’s Sand Lake campus, they included apartment complexes by prominent local developers Epoch Properties and Unicorp National Developments, an industrial park being jointly developed by Tavistock and McCraney Property Co., and an off-campus complex near the University of Central Florida by Landmark Properties, one of the nation’s biggest student-housing developers.
The beneficiaries also included the city of Cocoa, which saved $100,000 on permits related to improvements that the city in Brevard County is making to a water-treatment plant it owns in east Orange County.
Most of the developers declined to answer when asked if their projects would have happened without the permit discounts. But
one company — Altamonte Springs-based affordable housing developer Wendover Housing Partners — said the savings provided a big boost.
Wendover saved $100,000 in permit fees related to an apartment complex for low-income seniors it is building in Pine Hills called “Hawthorne Park.”
“Orange County waiving development fees during the pandemic was a big help in financing Hawthorne Park,” said Ryan von Weller, Wendover’s managing director of development. “Financing is the biggest challenge in building affordable communities, which is why there are so few companies doing it. We applaud Orange County’s effort to provide incentives that help remove some of the hurdles to development, especially when the result is solutions to the affordable housing crisis.”
It’s difficult to say whether the reducing permit fees stimulated any construction that wouldn’t have happened anyway. But county leaders say they think the discounts helped sustain the construction industry, noting, for instance, that in Orange County the number of residential building permits issued rose in 2020, despite the pandemic.
“I believe it was successful,” Demings said. “At the end of the day, we do know that residential building permits increased in 2020 over 2019. None of us know if that would have occurred without the incentives, but, given the fact that our economy was certainly suffering, my ultimate goal was to keep people working.”