Does saving Split Oak Forest doom other nature preserves?

Will the grassroots effort to save Split Oak Forest imperil neighboring preserves of spectacular nature?

In all of the years of raging controversy over a road proposed to cross a corner of Split Oak Forest in Orange and Osceola counties east of Orlando International Airport, that question has barely been scrutinized in public.

Road backers are offering to donate a parcel of 1,550 acres to buffer and protect Split Oak and adjoining conservation lands – if the road is allowed to cross the forest. They say they will put intense commercial development on that parcel next to those conservation lands if the road is rejected.

Left undeveloped, that 1,550-acre parcel also could help create corridors for panthers, red-cockaded woodpeckers, indigo snakes and other wildlife, spanning from Split Oak, to nearby Moss Park and Isle of Pine Preserve, to other, bigger conservation lands.

While the road’s opponents have rallied public and political support to defend Split Oak, the future of Orange County’s adjoining treasures hangs in the balance, all but unnoticed.

“Those definitely don’t catch as much attention as a proposed road,” said Suzanne Arnold of the Lake Mary Jane Alliance of rural residents near Split Oak Forest. But, she said, “Obviously these lands need to be protected from intense development.”

Across Florida, the advancing front of development has been devastating for habitats: blocking wildlife migration, causing roadkill, unleashing predatory domestic cats and dogs, upsetting natural drainage patterns, introducing hazardous landscaping chemicals and preventing critical use of controlled fires for forest health.

The 1,550-acre donation parcel is a developer’s admission of the environmental toll taken when residential and commercial construction arrives at the edge of natural lands.

A lawsuit filed by Osceola County government in 2020 makes much the same point as it challenges an Orange County referendum that year to keep the road out of Split Oak Forest.

Osceola, wanting the road, this past week in a legal filing said Orange voters were duped by being told nothing about the 1,550-acre donation offer and did not know their vote to save Split Oak Forest was “anti-conservation.”

As the four-year-old lawsuit advances, Orange County commissioners, who oppose the expressway, have scheduled a study session for Tuesday on the Split Oak controversy. Meanwhile, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Split Oak’s custodian, is negotiating behind closed doors with the expressway’s proponents and revealing little about the timing of a public meeting for a final vote.

The proposed road, the tolled, State Road 534 expressway, would lead from one of the region’s busiest highways, State Road 417, at Orlando’s airport.

It would go east along the Orange and Osceola counties border and dip down to cross the southwest corner and south end of Split Oak Forest within Osceola County.

That route would take 60 acres of the 1,689-acre Split Oak Forest for roadway and isolate another 101 acres from the rest of the forest, impairing its natural functions.

The Orlando Sentinel has visited those 161 acres many times. Their loss to the expressway would be painful: The scrubby flatwoods there are among the best of that ecosystem type in Florida, according to a state advisory group.

But, as any visitor to the southern reach of Split Oak likely would notice, an assault on those woods already is accelerating, with construction of adjoining or nearby subdivisions underway. At the southwest corner, backyard decks and lawns push up to the forest’s fence.

The partnership of road backers is a juggernaut: the region’s toll road agency, the Central Florida Expressway Authority; Osceola County government; Tavistock Development Co., the maker of Medical City and Lake Nona community; and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose 300,000 undeveloped acres east and south of Orlando’s airport are popularly identified as owned by a subsidiary, Deseret Ranches.

The road, the partnership asserts, would solve future congestion, most of which would be of their own making with the massive development they have planned for Osceola County. But the stage is set and approved for that development, and the expressway authority, county, Tavistock and Deseret say what’s important is to pursue growth in an environmentally sensitive manner, as they are proposing.

“We view this as a signature project that will be used to guide the development of future transportation corridors,” said Tawny Olore, deputy Osceola manager, speaking to state wildlife authorities in December.

The 1,550-acre donation would wrap around Split Oak and adjoining conservation parcels in the shape of a reverse letter “L.”

That acreage has a mosaic of terrains, including Roberts Island Slough, an extensive strand of wetlands that appears darkly forbidding and nearly impenetrable, but is a stronghold of ecological health.

Also within the 1,550 acres is increasingly rare Florida scrub – a desert-like habitat prized for endangered plants and wildlife. Some of the land is abandoned orange groves.

To pay for restoring natural habitat there, the expressway authority has agreed to provide an estimated $13 million, with the final amount set by actual costs.

That commitment is unusual. Big parcels bought by the state are typically handed over to an environmental agency, which then scrounges for restoration money for many years.

“When has anyone ever stood in front of an agency and said there’s funding to maintain and operate an environmental area?” asked Brandon Arrington, an Osceola commissioner and chairman of the expressway authority, at the December state hearing.

Audubon Florida has supported accepting the 1,550 acres as the least bad option in an area exploding with growth, making road options increasingly torturous. The group’s executive director, Julie Wraithmell, has pushed authorities for maximum restoration funding.

The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission should, Wraithmell said in a letter, “bargain nimbly and powerfully” if more than $13 million is needed for restoration of the 1,550 acres.

The border between Orange and Osceola is also a political fault line. Pressure for the road and development is building on one side of that line. A legacy of conservation is on the other side.

In 2010, Osceola leaders approved a Tavistock and Deseret development venture called the Northeast District, which is three times as large as the city of Winter Park.

The 19,000-acre Northeast District project, promising 40,000 “high-quality” jobs and homes for 46,000 residents, adjoins Split Oak, Moss Park and Isle of Pine Preserve.

In 2015, Osceola leaders approved what Seminole and Orange counties continue to resist – a flood of urban and suburban development in its eastern expanse of rural lands.

Osceola joined Deseret as a partner in a residential and commercial development called North Ranch. It is staggeringly large at 130,000 acres, which is nearly twice the size of Orlando.

The transportation link between the Northeast District and North Ranch and metro Orlando is the proposed road across Split Oak Forest.

In contrast to Osceola, Orange long ago designated the landscape around Split Oak as critical for conservation, and has spent significant sums of local tax dollars toward that goal.

The purchase of Split Oak was 30 years ago, with Orange paying $2.3 million, Osceola $2.7 million and the state $3.6 million.

But nearly a half-century ago, Orange purchased 1,500 acres next to Split Oak for $556,000. Today, that property is the county’s largest park: Moss Park.

A vast portion of it, conjuring a time when Florida was pristine and unexplored, is an island of forest surrounded by wetlands inaccessible to anyone but park staff.

Next to Moss Park is Isle of Pines Preserve, a 464-acre parcel once slated for homes but purchased for $7.6 million in 2007.

The preserve today offers iconic scenery of Florida flatwoods, where native ground cover of shrubs and grasses is low-lying and the royalty of pines – longleaf pines, which have cones as big as pineapples – display signature, treetop bursts of canopy.

To the west of Split Oak is Eagles Roost, a 232-acre conservation parcel purchased about 20 years ago for $8.5 million. North of Moss Park is Crosby Island Marsh Preserve, a 272-acre conservation property bought in 2004 for $2.2 million and now a mosaic of wetlands and forest.

In all, Split Oak Forest and the cluster of adjoining conservation lands cover nearly 3,000 acres. That’s a modest expanse compared to many conservation areas, like Orange’s 9,500-acre Hal Scott Preserve 5 miles to the north.

But the Split Oak Forest cluster could be part of something bigger, said Arnold of the Lake Mary Jane Alliance.

“We have always argued for a wildlife corridor,” said Arnold, estimating doing so for 20 years. “We have hit on that over and over again in every presentation we have done.”

Natural corridors for wildlife — which help ensure genetic diversity, a wider distribution of species and migration according to weather and climate changes –– increasingly are a prime environmental objective in Florida.

Even the massive North Ranch development project has mapped out wildlife corridors. One of them leads to the 5,000-acre TM Econ mitigation parcel in Orange County. It is where hundreds of development projects that have harmed natural lands elsewhere in the county have paid fees for environmental restoration.

By many accounts, the TM Econ parcel, which Orange County owns a portion of, has been a success, although its main owner would not permit a Sentinel visit.

The TM Econ parcel is a little more than a mile east of the 1,550-acre donation parcel. The land between belongs to Deseret. The Sentinel asked Deseret if it would dedicate a wildlife corridor there.

“While Deseret Ranch doesn’t have protected corridors on its land, it has a long history of cooperating with state agencies in conducting wildlife surveys, collecting data, and implementing best practices to encourage habitat protection,” spokesperson Jon Peck said.

Orange Commissioner Emily Bonilla, who has been especially vocal about keeping the road out of the forest, said she isn’t swayed by the road backers’ offer of 1,550 acres.

“We shouldn’t have to trade,” Bonilla said, adding that if the road’s proponents cared about the environment, they would turn over conservation property without strings or charges. “They are more than free to donate some of that land to us.”

Responding to the Sentinel, when asked if commercial development will occur next to Split Oak, Moss Park and Isle of Pine Preserve if the road is rejected, Tavistock spokesperson Jessi Blakley emailed a brief reply.

“Yes,” Blakley said.