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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Last week, she\u00a0 sent an email to County Manager Byron Brooks\u00a0 labeling the county\u2019s current defense as \u201clegally and strategically deficient\u201d to fend off CFX\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cCritically, the County Attorney\u2019s Office has engaged publicly in a debate over potential legal strategies, effectively broadcasting the County\u2019s vulnerabilities and explicitly stating that \u2014 given the difficulty of successfully challenging an Order of Taking in court \u2014 it would be more strategically advantageous for the County to engage in pre-suit negotiations\u2026 \u201d Semrad wrote in the memo to Brooks, referring to the attorney\u2019s skepticism voiced before the Jan. 12 vote.<\/p>\n
She wants her request placed on the board\u2019s meeting agenda for Feb. 10.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s bid for more publicly owned property for the extension of State Road 534, also known as the Osceola County Parkway.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe absolutely need someone who\u2019s open to hearing our concerns and fighting for us and fighting for our voters,\u201d Uribe said.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt is very difficult to prove that,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Wilson was concerned that a former assistant county attorney now works for CFX.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I am not sure this is necessarily the lever that needs to be pulled,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Osceola County had sued Orange County to invalidate the measure but lost.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s offer of $2.39 million for the two dozen acres its governing board declared to be \u201cnecessary\u201d for its toll road segment.<\/p>\n
The board vote means CFX likely will have to sue to get the land.<\/p>\n
Semrad said the board must act quickly because CFX could sue next month.<\/p>\n
\u201cRetaining outside counsel is no longer optional; it is urgent and essential to protect the county\u2019s legal rights, defend public property interests and preserve any remaining leverage in compensation negotiations,\u201d she said in her memo.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CFX\u2019s 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\u2019s southern edge in Osceola County and onward to vast swaths of land in Orange and Osceola counties envisioned for large residential and commercial projects.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cin perpetuity\u201d as conservation space.<\/p>\n
It serves as a mitigation site for relocated gopher tortoises, a threatened species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A key Orange County Commissioner is pushing to hire outside counsel to fight the Central Florida Expressway Authority…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1563,28,114,266,115,1335,139,141,140,109],"class_list":{"0":"post-133477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-latest-headlines","11":"tag-local-news","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-orange-county","14":"tag-orlando","15":"tag-orlando-headlines","16":"tag-orlando-news","17":"tag-social"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}