Next month, Ocoee will finally break ground on the reconstruction of a street it one day hopes to make the centerpiece of its downtown as part of a master plan almost a decade in the making.

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West Oakland Avenue will be rebuilt to handle commercial activity like stores and restaurants, with city leaders envisioning it will one day become “main street” in everything except its name.

The road is currently a far cry from that, featuring single-family homes on large parcels of land. The city utilizes West McKey Street one block over for its major commercial activity, but city leaders say West Oakland is more suitable for several reasons, including more amenable property owners and the ability to tie Winter Garden’s bike trail system to Ocoee’s lakefront.

“I’ve already got citizens tell me they love it. They love what we’re doing,” Mayor Rusty Johnson said. “This place is a good place to bring your family, raise your family. We just need to add amenities.”

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Plans for the shift began in 2017, when Ocoee began working on its downtown master plan. At the beginning of the project, officials projected it would cost taxpayers $43 million to convert the sleepy city center into a Winter Garden rival.

Reality has turned out to be more costly than that. On Tuesday, city staff announced they’ve already invested $70 million into the project, which has been used to upgrade the existing downtown, shift infrastructure pipes and wires, adjust rail lines, buy nine different parcels to support the development, as well as build the new city hall and a park to memorialize the Ocoee Massacre victims.

While staff accepted some responsibility for bad estimating, the mayor put most of the blame on the changing economic conditions.

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“Everything doubled,” he said. “It’s like where my son built a house that should have been $250,000, $500,000… [COVID also] cut it off. We were sitting here just spinning our wheels not been able to do get stuff done because of that.”

West Oakland’s construction will coincide with another major change: the demolition of the old city hall. City commissioners spent half of Tuesday’s workshop discussing what to do with the prime site, with no firm outcome.

The other major topics were hiring a master developer and parking, with staff instructed to find a few parcels that could handle surface lots to accommodate eventual businesses that could be converted into multi-level garages as needs change (city leaders will make a formal vote during the next meeting).

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“This is our chance to build our destination,” one commissioner said, calling the moment “our ticket to the future.”

Eventually, commissioners hope the downtown will be on the level of Winter Garden and Winter Park, with a lakefront park to rival Kissimmee’s. Walkable shopping, upscale restaurants and residential condos and apartments would fill in the rest of the parcels.

“It’s time to hire the right person, spend the money, do it right,” another commissioner commented. “You really didn’t see much until the [Winter Garden] trail went up… Now we’re cleaning up things that weren’t done right 75 years ago.”

Demolition of the old city hall is expected to begin in the first week of August. West Oakland Avenue’s reconstruction is projected to last 15 months.

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