New growth management director Brian Herrmann guides Lake Wales' plans
As Lake Wales seeks to preserve its historic character, the person largely responsible for implementing the strategy is a newcomer to the city.
Brian Herrmann joined Lake Wales in September to lead the Growth Management Division, the department previously called Development Services. Herrmann, 50, had worked in development planning for the Citrus County town of Crystal River since 2018.
Before that, Herrmann held planning roles in Thomasville, Georgia, and Beaufort County in South Carolina. He holds degrees in historic preservation and planning from the College of Charleston and a master’s in community planning from Florida Atlantic University.
Mark Bennett, Lake Wales’ director for development services, left in February for a position with Polk County.
Upon learning of the opening in Lake Wales, Herrmann and his wife drove down to the city on a Sunday afternoon.
“I loved driving around the downtown,” Herrmann said. “I feel like the bones of our downtown are really good, and the very traditional pattern. It’s not something where there’s nothing there and you've got to kind of build new buildings. It’s already there, it just sort of needs some life and energy pumped back into it.”
The Lake Wales Envisioned Plan emphasizes Traditional Neighborhood Development, a concept Herrmann said he fully embraces. That approach emphasizes walkability over neighborhoods designed around convenience for driving, with buildings facing streets and parking areas to the side or rear.
The concept also promotes tree-lined streets and a mix of land use and housing types and sizes.
“There’s two kinds of tools in the toolbox that the city is looking at,” Herrmann said. “One is just improving its overall neighborhood design, and the other would be the actual TND, or traditional neighborhood development, which is a very specific type of development. It’s really important to do the same thing we did with our downtown, to come in and just raise our standards for overall neighborhood development in general.”
Herrmann is enthusiastic about the emphasis on land preservation in the Lake Wales Envisioned plan, which calls for establishing a Big Green Network.
“It’s almost like establishing an urban growth boundary, in a way,” he said. “It’s not so much just because we don't want to grow. It's more of, these are environmentally sensitive lands, and we want to make sure that we don't just trample all over them. We can protect them and actually highlight them.”
Lake Wales has also hired Kevin Polk as landscape designer and arborist for the Parks and Recreation Department. Polk will oversee plans to revive the landscapes in the city’s historic core, based on a design from the 1930s created by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Olmsted Brothers and commissioned by Edward Bok, the city said in a news release.
Polk previously worked for the city of Lakeland, supervising the landscape design plans at Hollis Gardens. He later managed landscape initiatives for Lakeland’s parks and streetscapes.
Polk will help implement the Lake Wales Connected plan, a framework for revitalizing downtown and the Northwest neighborhood.
“The history of landscape architecture in Lake Wales is unique,” Polk said in the release. “I plan to make each landscape unique and aesthetically beautiful while keeping the historical charm of Lake Wales.”
Polk holds a bachelor’s degree in business management from the University of South Florida and a certification in public administration from Florida State University. He is certified as a horticulture professional by the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: New growth management director guides Lake Wales' plans
