Voters said ‘Save Split Oak.’ Why weren’t they heard?
The first four words say it all. “Protecting Split Oak Forest.”
Those words headed an Orange County charter amendment meant to wrap the serene wilderness park east of Orlando with an impenetrable shield. The November 2020 ballot question — approved by a thundering 86% majority — included an unequivocal message to the Orange County Commission: Leave Split Oak Forest alone.
Given the headlines at the time, it’s not hard to complete that sentence: “Don’t desecrate our beloved park with a high-speed toll road that would benefit two of Central Florida’s wealthiest and most influential developers.”
That is, in fact, the plan that Orange and Osceola officials were pursuing — and still are. Orange County officials have not withdrawn their support for a request that would break through the legal protections on 160 acres of parkland, clearing the way for an extension of the Osceola Parkway.
Why not? That’s a question County Mayor Jerry Demings wouldn’t answer when Commissioner Nicole Wilson (who wasn’t in office when the project was first approved) challenged him.
But she’s not the only one who deserves an explanation. The 503,801 voters who told the County Commission to protect Split Oak Forest are being snubbed — and if the Florida Communities Trust votes on Wednesday to strip protection from those 160 acres, those voters should be outraged.
County officials could have stopped this. They were told to stop this. But they didn’t.
A barely adequate bargain
Let’s be clear: This wasn’t a good versus evil decision. As first proposed in 2019, the loss of the 160 acres (all located in Osceola County) was part of a compromise. Other proposed routes would have destroyed homes or taken even more of the forest.
But the deal, brokered by the Central Florida Expressway Authority, included a sweetener: The donation of 1,550 acres, including former farmland, forest and wetlands, that would augment other parks in the area. That property would be given up by Tavistock Development Co. and Suburban Land Reserve, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the same two companies that would most benefit from the Osceola Parkway extension. Officials with the Florida Audubon Society, who were involved in the negotiations, said they expected the companies to also contribute toward the cost of maintaining the remainder of Split Oak and the newly preserved land.
It was a clear case of pay to play, funded by some of the deepest pockets in Central Florida — companies that poured millions into local campaign coffers with every election cycle, and who were accustomed to getting their way. And there was an extra layer of irony: Split Oak was created in 1991 as an uplands mitigation
bank, a way to balance the impact of rampant development. Its creation allowed developers to buy credits to offset acres they planned to plow and pave. This didn’t escape local residents: This was property that was supposed to be preserved forever, in compensation for sins past. Now it was to be sacrificed to enable more development.
But all the alternatives seemed worse. The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board reluctantly — very reluctantly — supported the swap as the “best that we could get.”
“Nothing says progress in Florida like building a highway through a protected forest, especially when a key goal of the road is to help open up tens of thousands of acres to development east of St. Cloud,” an editorial noted in November 2019. “The Central Florida Expressway Authority has come up with a new plan that, while imperfect, is a vast improvement.”
But some outraged Orange County residents refused to resign themselves to the inevitable. A year later, they put the question before voters. That 86 percent vote changed everything.
Or at least, it should have.
Alive and kicking
Wilson was elected to the commission a few months before the vote on the Split Oak amendment, and during her campaign she made her disdain for the county’s bargain clear. Like many, she assumed the project was dead, though a lawsuit filed by Osceola County, aimed at stopping the vote, was still pending.
But in reality — as she wrote in a January letter to Demings — “Orange County quietly continued to work on unraveling Split Oak protections.” She wanted to know why commissioners weren’t informed the project was still pending, with the proposed road now designated as a “linear facility” — a narrow loophole that’s usually interpreted to allow utility easements and water lines to traverse conservation land. She asked that the county withdraw its support for the Florida
Communities Trust request and that the matter be brought back to the commission.
County Attorney Jeffrey Newton responded that Wilson — who was not on the commission at the time of the 2019 vote — couldn’t ask for the matter to be revisited.
But four of the five commissioners who voted in 2019 to approve the project are still members of the commission: Victoria Siplin, Mayra Uribe, Christine Moore and Demings.
They were all aware of the 2020 referendum vote. They should have asked whether the project was still proceeding. They should have acted to remove the county’s support.
Ignoring the will of voters is a grave affront. These officials need to explain why this wasn’t settled within a few months of the November referendum.
That leaves one standing question: How should the Florida Communities Trust vote on Wednesday when asked whether to strip protection from the land?
We think it’s obvious. The trust’s governing board should deny the request, and objections filed before Wednesday’s vote — including a letter from Clay Henderson, the undisputed expert on land preservation law in Florida — provide ample legal cover to deny the Osceola Parkway request.
But it should never have come to this. In November 2020, Orange County voters spoke on the subject of Split Oak Forest, and their message was unequivocal.
The voters spoke, and they thought their leaders were listening. They were wrong. That’s a disappointment that Orange County residents won’t soon forget.