Residents in Bithlo wary of toll road plans
Many Bithlo residents have become wary as a state agency and a local authority roll out plans to build a toll road across east Orange County.
The specter of a new expressway has become a daily topic in the unincorporated community about 20 miles east of downtown Orlando. A route — revealing which homes will be razed, which businesses will lose real estate and what ranch land will be chopped in size — won’t be resolved perhaps for years.
An expressway would provide a way around congestion on State Road 50 in the Bithlo area by lengthening State Road 408 about 7 miles from where it ends at S.R. 50 at the west side of Bithlo to State Road 520 at the eastern outskirts of Bithlo.
But while long regarded as a backwater hamlet, Bithlo is beginning to pay closer attention to developers pushing to fill the area with homes and traffic.
“The sleeping tiger has been awakened,” said Orange County Commis-
sioner Jennifer Thompson on how Bithlo residents are wary of a new road. “I’m not sure we need to run around like our hair is on fire yet, but we need to pay attention.”
The greater Bithlo area takes in aging mobile homes and sprawling auto-salvage yards, a newer incursion of walled-off, tract housing and a surge of commercial development along S.R. 50.
A group, Save Orange County Inc., wants to create a new municipality spanning Bithlo and possibly more of east Orange County: “We want more local control,” said Bill Lutz, a Bithlo resident since 1978.
Also part of the changing landscape is the Econlockhatchee River. It flows north from Osceola County through Orange County, to Bithlo, and then to Seminole County, where it joins the larger St. Johns River.
With current and planned sprawl in the three counties sandwiching the river, the “Econ” still retains some of its wild character of inky swamp water rippling silently among cypress trunks and knees.
Environmental groups have opposed proposals for new bridges across the Econ.
Exactly where and when a new expressway would cross the Econ and east Orange County is unclear even for transportation officials; the outlook is murkier still for residents.
“There’s a lot of rumors right now,” said Bithlo resident Cathy LaPoint, during a public meeting last week, when the Central Florida Expressway Authority presented its latest concept for where to put a toll road — south of State Road 50 — in east Orange County.
Added her husband, Norman, “I also heard the state is doing a study.”
The state, in fact, is months from launching a study.
The state Department of Transportation’s office of Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, which oversees the agency’s toll roads, expects to start an 18-month study in September.
It would look at putting an expressway through Bithlo along or in the middle of S.R. 50.
That approach, using state-owned right-of-way of the heavily used highway, has been widely favored, including by the Central Florida Expressway Authority, the operator of most toll roads in the Orlando region.
The local authority once proposed building a couple of miles of elevated expressway and several miles of surface expressway along S.R. 50.
Last year, however, the state Department of Transportation said its right-of-way was off limits to the authority.
DOT’s secretary then, Jim Boxold, said his agency was “amenable” to taking over the task of building the expressway.
But worry over a lack of stronger commitment by the state has spurred the region’s expressway authority to take on yet another study.
That study initially looked at five corridors, including one bending far north of S.R. 50 and one dipping into neighborhoods sprawling outward from Waterford Lakes and Avalon Park.
The route selected was revealed last week. It depicts a serpentine path through the Bithlo area near Old Cheney Highway, a half-mile bridge across the Econ and coming within steps of the Flying D Ranch home of Fred Dietrich.
The Central Florida Expressway Authority’s proposed route likely would get discarded if the state follows through on its tentative interest in building an expressway along S.R. 50.
But that theoretical outcome appears lost on worried residents of Bithlo.
“If we lose this land, that’s everything the family has worked for the last 100 years,” said Sarah Deitrich, a niece and one of many of the family’s cattle hands.