ORLANDO, Fla. — A developer wants to build hotel rooms and apartments in Central Florida’s Shingle Creek Basin, but some environmentalists say that area is one of the most sensitive wetlands in Florida.
A special magistrate recommended that Orange County commissioners reconsider the project’s application after commissioners rejected it last year.
Lee Perry is the founder of the Protect Shingle Creek group. She’s updating its website before the proposed Tuscana Planned Development project goes back before Orange County Commissioners next week. Perry wants to stop developers from building on the wetlands within the Shingle Creek Basin.
“This particular basin touches three to four different districts in Orange County,” Perr said. “So if we pave it, much like Houston, the water is going to just back recede into neighborhoods, into businesses.”
A group of landowners, Shingle Creek Co-Owners, LLC and developer Geyer Development, LLC, want to build more than 1,000 hotel rooms and thousands of apartments in the Shingle Creek Basin. Water from the basin flows all the way down to the Everglades.
Orange County commissioners denied the project’s land use plan application last year, and the landowners appealed. Special Magistrate Igmedio Pantaleon ruled that the county’s decision is unreasonable and unfairly burdens the use of the petitioner’s property.
Commissioner Nicole Wilson disagrees.
“The idea of putting a gargantuan, really oversized development, whether it’s Tuscana or anything else, smack in the middle of that ecologically sensitive area, should alarm everybody,” Wilson said.
Wilson asserts that if developers build projects in the Shingle Creek Basin, some areas in Hunter’s Creek, Williamsburg and parts of Osceola County could be at risk for flooding in the future.
“We understand that to protect our existing residents and to protect our future, we’ve really got to protect that basin,” Wilson said.
Perry hopes county commissioners will protect the wetlands when the issue goes before them again this coming Tuesday.
“We want our commissioners and mayor to have a spine and to fight this. This is a just fight,” Perry said.
Spectrum News 13 reached out to Shingle Creek Co-Owners, LLC and Geyer Development, LLC on Thursday through an attorney working on the project. We have not heard back from either company as of Thursday evening.