ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 Orange County Commissioners are reluctantly giving the green light to a controversial plan for a development in a sensitive wetlands area. The plan calls for hotel rooms, apartments, and commercial buildings in the Shingle Creek Basin.<\/p>\n
Commissioners voted 4-3 Tuesday afternoon to approve the Tuscana Project\u2019s land use plan application after voting unanimously to reject it in May 2025. Tuesday, some commissioners feared losing a possible lawsuit could cost taxpayers huge amounts of money.<\/p>\n
The Shingle Creek Basin contains hiking trails, wildlife, and wetlands that form the headwaters of the Everglades. A group of landowners, Shingle Creek Co-Owners, LLC and developer Geyer Development, LLC, want to build more than 1,000 hotel rooms and 4,000 apartments in the Shingle Creek Basin. County leaders say the project would eliminate more than 20 acres of wetlands.<\/p>\n
Lee Perry, with the Protect Shingle Creek Group, opposes the development. Perry says paving over the wetlands could cause flooding in nearby neighborhoods after a hurricane.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne storm is all it takes to completely flood out the livelihood of so many people, especially our seniors that are already struggling financially,” Perry said.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Special Magistrate Igmedio Pantaleon recommended that commissioners reconsider the landowners\u2019 application after commissioners denied it last year.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, commissioners approved the land use plan application, which included the developer\u2019s offer to build a raised road to help protect the wetlands. Commissioners also incorporated several recommendations made by Pantaleon regarding flood mitigation, access roads, and protections for the wetlands.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Mayra Uribe voted yes. She claims the county faced the prospect of paying the landowners at least $120 million with taxpayers\u2019 money if they filed and won a lawsuit.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne, there\u2019s the value of the property, which is well over $100 million,” Uribe said. “There\u2019s also the fact that they would have developed and sold and made money off of it, and then there\u2019s legal fees.”<\/p>\n
Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad voted no and urged her colleagues to take the case to court to fight the development.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Nicole Wilson also voted no, saying building this project in the middle of a wetlands area could cause devastating floods in the future.<\/p>\n
Wilson explains, \u201cI think the board, my colleagues who voted in the other direction were intimidated by the legal process, but I believe that the county had every right to deny the project from the outset.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shingle Creek Co-Owners, LLC sent a statement to Spectrum News Tuesday afternoon. It said, “Shingle Creek Co-Owners appreciates the Orange County Commission\u2019s careful consideration of the Special Magistrate\u2019s findings and its decision to approve the Tuscana Land Use Plan and Conservation Area Impact Permit.”<\/p>\n
For years, the 176 individual property owners have worked through the county\u2019s public review process and have sought a reasonable use of privately owned property that the County has long designated for high-density development.<\/p>\n
The Special Magistrate\u2019s independent review confirmed our belief that the previous denial was not supported by competent substantial evidence and unfairly burdened the use of the property. This rezoning comes with specific conditions requiring the developers to guard against flooding and to provide for wetlands protection.<\/p>\n
Tuscana has been thoughtfully designed to balance environmental considerations with private property rights and the need for housing and economic opportunity in one of Orange County\u2019s most important tourism corridors. Beyond providing protection from flooding, larger wetland buffers, and significant environmental mitigation and preservation, this plan also provides thousands of jobs and over $600 million annually to Orange County at full build out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 Orange County Commissioners are reluctantly giving the green light to a controversial plan for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[3140,1337,115,1335,139,141,140,99],"class_list":["post-414257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-keith-landry","tag-news","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414257","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=414257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}