East Orange considers starting city
Fed up with fighting over encroaching development, some residents of east Orange are exploring whether it’s time to leave the county and create their own city.
Save Orange County, a key group opposed to controversial projects around Lake Pickett a few miles east of the University of Central Florida, has launched a petition drive on its website, saveorangecounty.org, that asks residents of the rural, eastern part of the county if they would support incorporating.
“After getting kicked [around], you think, ‘Hey, maybe this needs to happen,’ ” said Tom Narut, a member of the group. “So if there’s a history of the county going against our wishes, what makes sense? How can we stop bashing our head against the wall? The only answer is to control your own destiny.”
The proposal covers a roughly 100-square-mile area from Bithlo east to Christmas and
south to Wedgefield, which combined have a population of about 16,000 people, and rural sections stretching along the Brevard County border to the Osceola border.
“We’re not against development; we’re against urbanstyle development, the concrete jungle style you see in urban areas,” said John Lina, Save Orange County’s chair. “Our vision is to have people move to Central Florida and for them to say, ‘Hey, we should really look on the east side of town.’ There’s a higher standard of living, and it’s not embedded in a concrete jungle.”
The group stressed that the idea is in its embryonic stage and details about what it would mean for services, taxes and other important issues are not complete.
But for Save Orange County — which gathered more than 10,000 signatures on a petition opposing dense residential neighborhoods in Lake Pickett — becoming a city might be the last, best option to prevent what they see as a threat to their lifestyle east of the Econlockhatchee River.
Among the benefits of their own town, the group said on its website, were “Tax dollars [that] stay in East Orange County and work for you. Faster emergency response time. … Responsible growth and a stronger economy, not sprawl. … [and] a better quality of life.”
Bill Lutz, the Save Orange County vice chair, said that the petition has been up only a short time but has already garnered several hundred signatures. “It’s just lifting off the ground,” he said.
Attempts to incorporate have been made before, including a proposal in 2010 that all of Orange east of the Econ become a new city.
“The one thing [that attempt] lacked was the connection to the community, which is what we have,” Lina said. That proposal “tried to capture a large area … including Waterford Lakes and Avalon Park and UCF. We’re not going after those. The idea was good, it just tried to capture too much of an area.”
He said the ideal for east Orange would be for minimum lots of 1 acre, with most reaching 2 to 5 acres. By comparison, a change in zoning for Lake Pickett area last year allows for up to six lots per acre.
Lina said he had already moved twice within the county to get away from newer, denser development, from Eastwood to Avalon Park to Lake Drawdy, “and as soon as I move there, they started with Lake Pickett North.”
Lake Pickett North was defeated by the Orange County Commission in November, after a key supporter, Commissioner Ted Edwards, lost in last year’s election to anti-Lake Pickett activist Emily Bonilla.
Lake Pickett South and its 2,000 planned homes was approved, though. A separate group of residents are appealing the new zoning rules before a judge at hearings scheduled for Monday through Wednesday at the Orange County Courthouse.
If the judge rules in the residents’ favor, Lutz said, the Lake Pickett South development would be dealt a fatal blow.
But if they lose and new zoning rules stay as they are, he said, the possibility of future development — at Lake Pickett and possibly across the region — would always exist.
Commissioner Emily Bonilla, who is working on her own rural plan for the area, said that if the incorporation idea gets off the ground, “I’ll support what the community wants. But you definitely have to see what the process is for that.”
Incorporation is not easy. Poinciana, an area of more than 70,000 people in Osceola and Polk counties, has tried to do it several times since 2009 but has been stymied by a number of factors, including lack of support from their state legislators and rejections by the courts.
Any attempt at incorporation needs to include a feasibility study, a five-year operational plan and approval by the Legislature. State law also mandates an average population density of at least 1.5 people per acre unless there were “extraordinary conditions.”
Typically, Bonilla said, “municipalities are for cities and not rural areas, because of taxes, expenses for residents, [and] services. Bithlo used to be a municipality, but it went bankrupt because it couldn’t support itself.”
Narut, though, said that a new city would be a way of getting back in services what it pays in taxes.
While the numbers are still being crunched, he said, operating a city would be challenging, but would still be worth the risk.
“It’s the difference between running an elementary school,” he said, “and running UCF.”