New stretch of Wekiva Parkway nearly done
Road paves way for Kelly Park Crossing
Donald and Annette Emery raised five kids and built a comfortable life over three decades on a placid site in rural northwest Orange County, surrounded mostly by orchid greenhouses and horse farms.
All that tranquility is about to change — and locals are looking forward to the growth that’s to come.
This summer, the Central Florida Expressway Authority is expected to open a new section of the Wekiva Parkway, and traffic will spill out near the Emerys’ driveway.
The opening also is expected to spur movement on the longawaited start of Kelly Park Crossing, a nearby development project on hold since it was approved nearly six years ago.
“We’ve seen a lot of changes,” said Donald Emery, 55, who bought his property in 1986. “With construction of the road, we’ve seen a steady increase in traffic. … As far as progress moving out here, we’re OK with that.”
The 624-acre Kelly Park Crossing, expected to be built in four phases, calls for 1,550 new homes, 178 acres of warehouses
and other light industrial uses and 93 acres of parks.
“We thought it would be open by now,” said Jeff Welch, president of Rochelle Holdings, the company developing the massive project. “The good news is all of the pieces seem to be aligning about the same time right now.”
Houses will replace acres of serenading cicadas.
Less than a mile west, Barry Grimm, owner of Greenbrier Memory Garden for Pets, a business that describes itself as “Your Afterlife Pet Care Specialist” has no plans to relocate the 17-acre cemetery, where remains of 13 police dogs are interred.
The ashes are marked by stones under a bronze statue of Ryko, a German shepherd who served the Apopka Police Department for seven years before dying of cancer in October 2013.
A busier road could boost the profile of the pet cemetery and crematory, which takes in remains from Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas.
“After all these years, there are still some people in Apopka who have never heard of Greenbrier,” Grimm said under the watchful guise of a colorful, 20-year-old macaw that was named Harvey until it laid an egg.
Sang-hoon Lee, who grows orchids in a Kelly Park Road greenhouse across from one of the exit ramps, said he welcomes the new road because it means his house won’t shake any longer from road-building machines. More traffic doesn’t worry him.
“I say no problem,” he said.
When finished in 2038, Kelly Park Crossing also will include a state college, 400 hotel rooms and perhaps a hospital, according to design plans.
Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer hailed the proposed project as a place that could provide opportunities for office parks and that would mean hundreds of local jobs.
“There’s tremendous potential for that kind of employment center,” he said, envisioning an office-park development similar to those lining Interstate 4 in Lake Mary and Maitland.
On Wednesday, Apopka City Council members approved minor but important changes to the project’s development order that included extending the phasing schedule.
The first phase was supposed to be finished already. Its new target date is 2023.
“Because of economic conditions and because of the timing of the construction of the Wekiva Parkway, it wasn’t able to proceed” as originally planned, Apopka Chief Planner David Moon explained at a planning commission meeting last month.
As for the new Wekiva Parkway section, road-builders are shooting for completion of the 5-mile stretch of elevated toll road by the end of June, but late July is more likely, said Mary Brooks, a spokeswoman for the Expressway Authority. It will extend State Road 429 from U.S. Highway 441 to West Kelly Park Road, where an on-ramp will run the length of a 26-acre horse ranch, which sold for $4.67 million in 2006.
The $46.6 million road segment, which was started in August 2015, is part of the $1.6 billion Wekiva Parkway, authorized in 2004 by the Legislature to protect wildlife and the quality of the water flowing into Wekiva Basin springs. When the 25-mile parkway is finished, it will connect S.R. 429 to State Road 417 and complete a beltway around metropolitan Orlando.
The parkway is crucial to Kelly Park Crossing.
Rochelle Holdings’ Welch said that it will transform Apopka.
“Apopka for a long time has been kind of an isolated bedroom community,” he said. “A lot of people who have moved here in the last 10, 20 years are looking for that live-work-play kind of a community. Kelly Park Crossing should deliver a lot of that.”