Split Oak Forest proposal for Osceola Parkway is best we’ll get
Nothing like leaving a bag of blazing dog mess on someone’s porch and ringing the doorbell.
Which is kind of what the Osceola Expressway Authority did before it met a welcome death, folded into the region’s larger Central Florida Expressway Authority last year.
That mess on the porch was a plan to extend a toll road — the Osceola Parkway — smack through the middle of Split Oak Forest, a beloved conservation area that bisects Orange and Osceola counties east of Lake Nona and the airport.
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.
The Central Florida Expressway Authority has come up with a new plan that, while imperfect, is a vast improvement over the Osceola authority’s scorchedforest approach.
Rather than take the highway smack through the middle of Split Oak, as Osceola traffic planners had suggested, the new plan reroutes it through the southern end of the forest.
The compromise accomplishes several worthwhile things:
It ensures the road won’t cause the loss of any existing homes, which would have been the consequence of yet another proposed route that kept the highway farther south and out of the forest altogether. It also keeps the road some distance away from other subdivisions and homeowners who never counted on having a major highway in their backyards.
It also means the 1,700-acre forest will stay largely intact. That’ll allow forest managers to conduct controlled burns, which helps keep the longleaf pine and oak scrub habitats environmentally healthy.
Controlled burns are a tricky business that depends on a variety of factors, including wind. Putting a highway through the forest’s midsection would have made burning all but impossible.
Finally, to sweeten the deal, landowners Tavistock and Suburban Land Reserve — who stand to make piles of money thanks in large part to the highway’s construction — are offering to donate for preservation 1,550 acres directly east of Split Oak and other existing conservation lands.
The compromise falls short as well, but in ways that might be resolved.
For example, the southernmost portion of Split Oak, about 100 acres below the highway, can’t be managed through burning, which clears out overgrown brush so plants and wildlife can thrive. Plus, some of the property to be donated is degraded, partly through clearing and partly because of invasive plant species.
To make this deal work, some kind of solution is needed to fix those issues. Perhaps the current landowners — Tavistock and Suburban Land — can also be persuaded to set up a permanent fund to do just that, rather than putting taxpayers on the hook.
Environmental groups are divided on the newest plan to run the highway through the forest’s southern end. We get the opposition’s arguments but don’t see a better way to go about building the highway. It might be a cliche, but perfect can be the enemy of good.
Orange and Osceola counties should back this compromise, because the prospects of finding a better solution are dim, and the highway extension is all but inevitable because of the development that’s been approved in the region.
Unfortunately, this road project represents a broader failure — particularly on Osceola County’s part — to take the environment into account when it’s doing deals with big landowners like Deseret Ranches, the massive agricultural operation that, along with Suburban Land Reserve, is under the corporate umbrella of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The highway is central to the ambitious development plans of the church and its business affiliates, as well as Tavistock. But Split Oak was treated at the start like an afterthought, an impediment to progress.
But that’s how we roll here in Florida. Local governments are for the most part really bad negotiators when they’re dealing with developers. We used to have an effective, state-level check on mega-developments, but Rick Scott and the Legislature took care of that inconvenience back in 2011 with a bill that sucked the life out of growth management in Florida.
So here we are in 2019: Sprawling developments are approved, big highways are planned to take care of the resulting traffic, and a forest that was supposed to be preserved for future generations is diminished.
The forest was dealt a bad hand, but the expressway authority’s current plan for Split Oak looks like it’s the best outcome we’re going to get.