Builders pushing mega-development in east Orange are back again
Familiar foes find themselves in a fracas again over a proposed mega-development in rural east Orange as residents hope to block a plan for 1,800 homes on ranchlands in the environmentally sensitive Econ River Basin.
Developer Sean Froelich’s proposed project also has a familiar sounding name, Sustanee, a spelling tweak of “Sustany,” the tag by which an earlier iteration of the plan was known in 2016 when it last fired up neighbors’ rancor. In rapidly-growing Central Florida, you can slow a development like this one, but given the economic stakes, it’s next to impossible to kill it.
“It’s like Groundhog Day,” east Orange homeowner Jessup Daniel, 32, said, referring to the 1993 movie about a TV weatherman forced to live an unpleasant experience over and over and over. “It never ends. These guys never quit.”
Neither do the project’s opponents.
More than 200 of them, some wearing the same red “Stop Urban Sprawl” t-shirts they wore to fight Sustany eight years ago, packed the Corner Lake Middle School cafeteria Thursday for a community meeting and lambasted the project.
“It’s the wrong development in the wrong location,” Sustanee foe Kelly Semrad said to hearty applause.
Sustanee is the seventh effort since 2009 to propose hundreds of homes on the former Rybolt ranch, much of which was acquired in 2014 for $15.5 million by Texas-based developers, according to Orange County property records.
The community’s concerns remain the same: inadequate road capacity, incompatibility with the surrounding properties, increased risk of flooding, and the potential harm to the environment, wildlife and their drinking water.
Sustanee opponents also worry the development will defile the 700-acre Econlockatchee Sandhills Conservation Area, a protected site to the west that protects the river, its floodplains and a large flock of sandhill cranes.
Some hooted at developer Froelich when he spoke of butterfly gardens and called Sustanee a nature-oriented community, boasting 860 acres of open space including a 25-acre hardwood hammock and 11 miles of nature trails.
He was unfazed by the criticism.
“It went about how I anticipated it would,” Froelich said. “There’s a lot of people out here that don’t want to see any more growth but the reality is Orange County is a growing urban county and people are moving to Florida and you can’t put a gate up to stop them.”
He said the name was changed because Sustany is copyrighted by a Tampa foundation for sustainability.
Froelich said the revised proposal is less dense — down 600 dwelling units from 2,400 to 1,800.
“We’re actually glad we’ve had this time to perfect it and detail it out,” he said.
Orange County Commissioner Emily Bonilla, elected to the board eight years ago largely because incumbent opponent Ted Edwards supported developments in east Orange, wasn’t surprised at what her constituents had to say.
“The citizens are against it. They don’t like it,” she said.
Several asked her how she planned to vote but she declined to say.
Many critics who filled the school cafeteria also have fired off hundreds of emails to Bonilla and her commission colleagues scheduled to decide Jan. 23 whether to move the project forward to a review by state authorities.
“I say NO to urban development in rural service areas,” wrote a 30-year resident, capping her message with a Native American proverb: “When the last fish is caught, the last tree has fallen and the last river has been polluted, only then will we realize we cannot eat money.”
The legally mandated community meeting was required by the state process to change Orange County’s future land use map, which had set the county’s vision for the 1,317-acre pasture land south of the Seminole County line as rural/agricultural.
Without a change, county rules would limit the development to 87 homes.
The new owners want a change to a special designation created by county commissioners in 2016 and previously used by developer Dwight Saathoff for a plan to put 2,078 homes on 1,185 pastoral acres just south of the Sustanee site.
The Grow ‘agri-hood’ chooses PulteGroup as primary home builder
Saathoff’s project, known as Lake Pickett South and pitched as “The Grow,” has been delayed by legal challenges but home-building could begin soon on the acres which the developer has described as an agri-hood.
Debbie Parrish, who has lived in east Orange for early 40 years, has been a voice of opposition to developing the rural acres that would make up Sustanee. “If I go back in my archives and I look at everything — it’s been a long time — I’ll find some really stupid plans,” she said in a phone interview. “We’ve been fighting for many, many years.”
She does not support Sustanee but she said the latest plan is better than previous ones.
“I told the developer this: it’s really great for the people who want to live there,” said Parrish, a Realtor. “But for the people that will live around it, it is not.”
