While settling into its permanent home at the former Jai Alai Orlando Seminole Fronton in Fern Park, Journey Church has encountered county code compliance issues. The church submitted a site plan review application to remove a tiny portion of a front traffic island, which triggered a comprehensive compliance review. Now, Journey Church will have some unanticipated bills to pay.
Journey Church acquired the 12.61-acre property, located at the corner of U.S. Highway 17-92 and Fernwood Boulevard, in January for $16.5 million after renting the 96,498-square-foot former jai-alai fronton building for three and a half years. The purchase became possible after county commissioners unanimously rejected a 2022 gambling referendum, killing a proposed Oxford Town Center high-rise and poker room development.
The church kicked off improvements right away, in part because it is obligated to the sellers to beautify the site within two years of the acquisition. Under the terms of the deal with New York-based investment group RD Management, the congregation must execute an extensive list of aesthetic overhauls.
“One of the stipulations that they made when they sold us the building was that we had to improve the exterior, which means repainting the building, putting in a pedestrian pathway with benches, constructing a blockade wall to completely mask public view of the building’s rooftop air conditioning units and doing the parking lot and all the trees and all of that,” said church facilities manager Freddy Vasquez. “Should we go past the two years, we have to pay a $1 million fine.”
Vasquez told GrowthSpotter the church immediately spent $350,000 on asphalt to top-coat and re-stripe the rear parking lot right after the acquisition. This project was prioritized to patch up severe craters that were actively damaging visitor vehicles, and the initial upkeep did not require county planning approval. The church also intends to spend another $150,000 on asphalt to change the front lot layout to improve traffic circulation.
The former Fern Park jai-alai facility, now home to Journey Church. The county is requiring that the church install landscape islands with shade trees in the parking lot. (Seminole County Property Appraiser)
Next on the list, a minor traffic island adjustment designed to ease a major Sunday parking lot bottleneck. Because the 1,503-seat sanctuary completely fills across four consecutive services, the church faces a narrow 20-minute turnover window to clear the parking lot and usher in the next wave of traffic.
Under county land development regulations, attempting structural front-lot changes legally requires the church to bring the rest of the historical lot up to modern standards. Consequently, planners have required the church to cut 8-by-8-foot diamond-shaped holes straight through its newly completed $350,000 asphalt lot to plant internal canopy trees. Vasquez estimates this internal parking lot landscaping will cost between $60,000 and $100,000.
This irrigation and planting estimate excludes future street landscaping along Fernwood Boulevard, also required by the county, where a road-widening project is underway to accommodate booming local residential growth.
A major driver of that growth is Oxford Place, a neighboring 50-acre mixed-use development featuring three luxury apartment communities totaling 780 units and 72,000 square feet of retail space owned by RD Management, the same investment group that sold the fronton property to the church. The active corridor also includes Terracotta Terrace, a five-story, 152-unit senior apartment community that broke ground in April.
Vasquez was particularly concerned about the expense and timing involved with modifying the parking lot right away.
“This would be one that we would be asking for relief from at this time, only because we are not deep pockets financially. If we could get some relief off the back parking lot for this time being, that would be greatly appreciated,” he told the county planners.
But the county wouldn’t wiggle on the parking lot landscaping. Instead, planners on July 8 handed down a split decision to the Fern Park congregation, strictly enforcing a mandate to carve internal tree islands out of the rear parking lot while offering a flexible timeline for street landscaping along an upcoming road expansion corridor.
To fund these unexpected code requirements alongside the front asphalt work, Vasquez noted the church will draw from a savings reserve remaining after its initial $5 million building down payment, while relying on weekly tithes and offerings to handle the rest.
Planners agreed that the county will not require the church to take on the streetscape, which requires planting canopy trees an average of 40 feet apart on center within an eight-foot-wide planting strip, until the surrounding road expansion project is completed.
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