A key Orange County Commissioner is pushing to hire outside counsel to fight the Central Florida Expressway Authority over its plans for a toll road through Split Oak Forest, after an in-house county attorney declared the battle was unlikely to be won.
Kelly Martinez Semrad was part of a bare four-vote commission majority two weeks ago to continue the fight against the road, initially approved by state officials over Orange County objections in 2024.
Last week, she sent an email to County Manager Byron Brooks labeling the county’s current defense as “legally and strategically deficient” to fend off CFX’s latest effort to grab another 24.3 acres of environmentally sensitive land adjacent to the forest that it now says is needed for the project. That includes about three acres of Eagles Roost, a county park.
The county used $8.5 million in taxpayer funds in 2006 to buy the 232-acre Eagles Roost conservation property, a portion of which now serves as the home of the Back To Nature wildlife refuge.
“Critically, the County Attorney’s Office has engaged publicly in a debate over potential legal strategies, effectively broadcasting the County’s vulnerabilities and explicitly stating that — given the difficulty of successfully challenging an Order of Taking in court — it would be more strategically advantageous for the County to engage in pre-suit negotiations… ” Semrad wrote in the memo to Brooks, referring to the attorney’s skepticism voiced before the Jan. 12 vote.
She wants her request placed on the board’s meeting agenda for Feb. 10.
Fellow commissioners Mayra Uribe and Nicole Wilson told the Orlando Sentinel Monday they, too, welcomed a discussion to hire outside counsel to argue against CFX’s bid for more publicly owned property for the extension of State Road 534, also known as the Osceola County Parkway.
“We absolutely need someone who’s open to hearing our concerns and fighting for us and fighting for our voters,” Uribe said.
At the Jan. 12 meeting, county attorney Debra Babb-Nutcher, who boasts decades of experience with eminent domain cases, told commissioners the county was unlikely to prevail if it fights CFX over the land in court unless it could show bad faith or gross abuse of discretion on the part of the road-building authority. “It is very difficult to prove that,” she added.
Wilson was concerned that a former assistant county attorney now works for CFX.
“But I am not sure this is necessarily the lever that needs to be pulled,” Wilson said in the Monday interview with the Sentinel, praising county attorneys for their successful defense of a charter amendment voters approved to protect Split Oak Forest.
Osceola County had sued Orange County to invalidate the measure but lost.
Semrad, Wilson and Uribe, a Democrat candidate for Orange County mayor, were joined by fellow commissioner Maribel Gomez Cordero on the winning side of the 4-3 board vote to reject CFX’s offer of $2.39 million for the two dozen acres its governing board declared to be “necessary” for its toll road segment.
The board vote means CFX likely will have to sue to get the land.
Semrad said the board must act quickly because CFX could sue next month.
“Retaining outside counsel is no longer optional; it is urgent and essential to protect the county’s legal rights, defend public property interests and preserve any remaining leverage in compensation negotiations,” she said in her memo.
Semrad said the county would not have to shoulder the cost of the legal fight with CFX as state law requires legal fees and other expenses, including fees for expert witnesses, to be paid by the agency trying to take the land.
CFX’s preferred route for the toll road extension starts at Orlando International Airport and runs eastward along the southern edge of Eagles Roost. It includes 1.3 miles across the forest’s southern edge in Osceola County and onward to vast swaths of land in Orange and Osceola counties envisioned for large residential and commercial projects.
The forest, spanning 1,689 acres in the two counties, was acquired in 1994 for $8.6 million by a coalition that included both counties and state agencies to be held “in perpetuity” as conservation space.
It serves as a mitigation site for relocated gopher tortoises, a threatened species.