A former Florida lawmaker won’t pay $400,000 owed to Seminole County. Now what?
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Nearly a year after a judge ordered former state lawmaker Chris Dorworth’s development firm to pony up more than $432,000 to reimburse Seminole County’s legal expenses after a failed lawsuit, Dorworth still hasn’t paid and says he has no intention of doing so.
It’s a maddening turn of events for officials who prevailed in the years-long legal battle, but now must fight Dorworth’s claim that only his River Cross development company is on the hook — and that it has just over $300 in the bank.
“We believe the taxpayers need to be reimbursed for the cost of litigation and for preserving really what was the will of the people,” said county Chairman Jay Zembower.
In 2021, U.S. District Judge Anne Conway dismissed a lawsuit from Dorworth, who charged that the county violated the Fair Housing Act in rejecting his proposed development. Last year, Conway sided with the county again, ordering the firm to pay back Seminole for the majority of the expenses the county incurred defending itself and writing that Dorworth’s attempts to invalidate the Rural Boundary were “completely unreasonable, groundless, and bordering on bad faith.”
Dorworth filed the suit in 2018, two months after county commissioners unanimously rejected his plans for a large residential and commercial development within the county’s rural boundary. Voters determined in 2004 via a countywide referendum that development density in the area, which covers much of eastern Seminole, should be limited.
The original proposal called for 1,370 single-family homes, apartments and townhouses, in addition to 1.5 million square feet of commercial and office space on 669 acres of old pasture land just east of the Econlockhatchee River and north of the Orange County line.
Last summer, in an effort to collect its court-ordered fees, the county sought to garnish the development firm’s Truist Bank account, but the bank responded that River Cross had $306 in its checking account.
Seminole commissioners say they intend to continue seeking to recoup the costs of defending the county. Zembower said this week he thought the judge’s order, which awarded nearly $93,000 less than what the county estimated it paid, was “very clear.”
Dorworth countered that the judge’s order for him to reimburse the county was “unorthodox and absurd” and that developing the property was the only way for River Cross to generate income.
“If Seminole County wishes to allow a suburban development on the property River Cross would be happy to pay the fees, but if not we will wind up dropping the contract and I have no plans to deposit any more money in the account ,” Dorworth wrote in an email to the Sentinel. “I encourage them to do so as River Cross would love to settle this and move forward. If not, they are welcome to all $306 per the court order.”
Dorworth, who was in line to be the speaker of the Florida House before losing re-election to the Seminole seat in 2012, has long been a powerful player in state and local politics. After losing his state House race, Dorworth worked as a lobbyist for Ballard Partners, where he was paid $1 million per year, according to court filings. He resigned from Ballard in April 2021, after disgraced former tax collector Joel Greenberg alleged Dorworth was involved in his schemes, which included trafficking of minors for sex. Dorworth also is suing Greenberg and his family, accusing them of damaging his reputation and costing him his job.
Dorworth and his wife, Rebekah, own a $1.4 million home in a gated neighborhood in Heathrow. The former lobbyist also owns a twin-engine Cessna through an LLC that he keeps in a hangar at Orlando Sanford International Airport, court records show. That arrangement has soured, as well: The firm that sublets the hangar is suing Dorworth, saying he owes $22,800 for rent and other expenses, while Dorworth counters that the hangar manager didn’t provide maintenance services as promised.
In recent years, Dorworth has focused on getting River Cross off the ground. He first approached the owners of the pastureland just north of the Orange County line in 2017, signing a letter of intent to purchase the property for $35.3 million. Three months later, Dorworth signed a contract to purchase the property, contingent on approval from Seminole to rezone the agricultural land to allow for a development. He’s spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars on deposits and he told the Sentinel in 2021 he had no other investors.
“Everybody knows that River Cross is Chris Dorworth and Chris Dorworth is River Cross,” Seminole County Commissioner Lee Constantine said this week.
Constantine said he’s still hopeful the county will be able to collect its money from Dorworth, who is trying to avoid paying his debt by using the River Cross entity as a “corporate shield” or “corporate veil” that protects him from liability.
“It is our responsibility and obligation as stewards of the taxpayer dollars to continue to try to get our money back,” Constantine said.
County attorney Kate Latorre confirmed she and her colleagues haven’t given up, though she declined to elaborate.
“We are still exploring options to see if there’s any other way to recover the fees,” she said.
Many residents and environmentalists opposed Dorworth’s development proposal, saying it would lead to sprawl and open the doors for other high-density developments in the rural area. Those opponents included David Bear, president of the nonprofit conservation group Save Rural Seminole, who said he thinks it was “not an accident” that Conway used Dorworth’s name times in her dozens of times in an order last year saying the developer should pay the county’s legal expenses.
The court should be able to “pierce the corporate veil,” allowing the county to collect its debt from Dorworth, said Bear, an attorney who lives in Winter Springs.
“Mr. Dorworth is trying to protect himself by playing a shell game,” Bear wrote in an email this week. “It’s not going to work.”
