Seminole residents fear proposed toll road to Sanford airport will destroy their area
Residents of a fast-growing pocket of Seminole County just north of Lake Jesup fear a proposal by regional transportation officials to build an elevated toll road connecting State Road 417 and the Orlando Sanford International Airport will split their neighborhoods, destroy conservation areas and bring more noise and traffic.
“I understand the growth of this area, and I understand the need,” said Ed Pauly, a resident of Kensington Reserve, one of several new neighborhoods near the airport. “But I would think that this would bring in a lot more noise, a lot more traffic, and it would upset the natural area between our neighborhoods. … There’s got to be a better way.”
Christina McClure’s home sits on more than 5 rural acres with horses and cows off Mellonville Avenue. She has lived there for nearly three decades. But preliminary maps show the new thoroughfare being considered by the Central Florida Expressway Authority cutting through near her land and her neighbors’ large properties.
“A majority of us out here have worked our entire lives for a piece of this American dream: buying several acres in a quiet area,” said McClure, who often rides her horses in the area. “But now it could all be gone because we’re just the little guys.”
For right now, the expressway authority, known as CFX, is conducting a so-called “concept, feasibility and mobility” analysis of building a nearly 2-mile long connector road between the tolled S.R. 417, near the Seminole toll plaza, and Red Cleveland Boulevard, which serves as the southern entrance into the airfield just north of East Lake Mary Boulevard.
Seminole commissioners in October 2021 urged CFX to look at ways of giving travelers a more direct route between the toll road and the airport. Within the past decade, hundreds of new homes have been built along that stretch of East Lake Mary Boulevard. And new home construction is planned for the coming years.
“Unfortunately, there is no convenient access to the OSIA [Sanford airport] from S.R. 417,” said Commissioner Lee Constantine in a letter to CFX officials at the time. He called the airport “an important economic and transportation hub within the Central Florida region.”
Scheduled to be completed in August, the CFX study would look at possible routes, the costs of acquiring land and construction, and the environmental impacts of a connector road. It also would consider other options to ease traffic congestion around the airport, such as widening East Lake Mary Boulevard and adding exit ramps on S.R. 417.
While the project’s costs are still being studied, CFX officials said such an elevated expressway could cost between $144 million and $161 million at today’s prices.
An average of 46,700 vehicles use S.R. 417 at East Airport Boulevard daily, according to data from the state’s Department of Transportation. And roughly 22,000 cars and trucks use the stretch of East Lake Mary Boulevard west of Red Cleveland Boulevard every day.
“A potential connector from the 417 to the airport could divert as much as 17,000 vehicles a day” off those roads by 2050, said Sunserea Gates, a senior project manager for VHB, a civil engineering consulting firm hired by CFX to conduct the study, at a recent Sanford commission meeting.
County and Sanford officials say those numbers are expected to increase in the coming years as new residential subdivisions are planned along East Lake Mary Boulevard, along with the growing use of the nearby Boombah Sports Complex.
The area designated for the proposed thoroughfare sits just north of Lake Jesup Wilderness and Conservation Area, a place filled with several protected species, including Florida scrub-jays, snail kites, gopher tortoises and bald eagles.
There are currently five active eagles’ nests in the area, Gates said.
“Any potential effects to environmental resources will be avoided and minimized to the extent feasible,” she said.
Seminole officials also noted that the Sanford airport is likely to grow in the coming years.
Currently, airport-bound motorists heading north or south on the S.R. 417 must exit either at Lake Mary Boulevard or Ronald Reagan Boulevard, then travel east through several busy intersections to reach the airport. Also, there is only an on-ramp to S.R. 417 from Airport Boulevard to head south on the toll road.
However, with Allegiant as its only major airline, the airport’s passenger count has remained steady in recent years. More than 2.8 million passengers traveled in and out of the facility in 2022, just short of its record year in 2019, when it saw nearly 3.3 million flyers, according to airport data. Passenger counts, however, plunged in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ken Wharry — a resident of Kensington Reserve, a residential community off Lake Mary Boulevard built five years ago and with more than 350 homes — said he doesn’t see the Sanford airport growing much larger than its current size, especially with the behemoth Orlando International Airport “an easy 30-minute drive away” in south Orange County.
“I don’t think this proposal is in the best interest of the people who live here,” he said about the connector. “I think what they really need to do is use their imagination for something better; maybe widening Lake Mary Boulevard.”
Regional transportation officials in 2007 studied building a connection between S.R. 417 and the airport. That analysis, however, determined that although there was a need to improve traffic access to the airport, such a connection was “not financially feasible” at the time.
But Gates said a connector today “is expected to provide needed capacity, decrease congestion, improve traffic operation, reduce travel times and improve safety, particularly along East Lake Mary Boulevard.”
CFX officials said they are planning to schedule a community meeting in June at Millennium Middle School to present the public with more details of the study.
But Sanford resident Kasey Gupta said it only takes a few minutes to drive from S.R. 417 to the airport entrance off Red Cleveland Boulevard. And building a new elevated thoroughfare to shave off a few minutes of driving is not worth the costs.
“The financial and environmental impact of this project is not worth that minuscule of a difference in travel time,” she said in an email to Seminole commissioners.
