Bret Jones, P.A.
Bret Jones, P.A. is the planning consultancy and land-use law practice whose work appears across three South Lake municipalities — Minneola, Groveland, and Clermont — most often attached to projects that signal new-urbanist, walkable-community, or design-forward vision. The firm represented the Citrus Grove new urbanist mega-project in Minneola alongside Geoffrey Mouen Architects: a four-hour September 2024 hearing yielded the seventeen-stipulation comprehensive plan amendment that capped condominiums at 1,000 units, removed communication towers entirely, restricted alcohol setbacks to the Town Square district, and rewrote the developer's proposal from the approval chair. In Groveland, Bret Jones represented Palisades Homeowners Association cases (2025) and applicant counsel on commercial license-hanging variances. The firm's portfolio reads as the ideological spine of anti-sprawl regulatory defense — when a project arrives with new-urbanist DNA, Bret Jones, P.A. is often the legal carrier.
What's on the record
Bret Jones, P.A. appears in the South Lake corpus on three documented vectors.
Citrus Grove new urbanist comprehensive plan amendment (Minneola, September 2024): The firm represented the Citrus Grove applicant alongside Geoffrey Mouen Architects in a four-hour hearing — the most consequential single vote in Minneola's two-year record. The presentation walked through new-urbanist design vocabulary: walkable community, fifteen-minute neighborhoods, mixed uses, narrow streets for speed reduction, zero-foot setbacks within the Town Square district. The Commission approved 3-1 (Henderson opposed) with seventeen stipulations rewriting the developer's proposal — height in feet not floors, industrial limited to "light," water facility acreage tripled, communication towers removed entirely, condominiums capped at 1,000 units. The stipulations operate as code-evolution by stipulation rather than by ordinance.
Palisades HOA representation (Groveland, November 2025): Bret Jones represented Palisades Homeowners Association in Groveland casework, including driveway-improvement compliance items.
Commercial use representation (Groveland, July 2025): The firm represented an applicant on a commercial license-hanging (office use) variance, addressing buffers, project timeline, and traffic concerns.
Why this matters for the corpus
Bret Jones, P.A. is the consistent legal carrier of new-urbanist planning vision across the cities most actively coding for design-forward outcomes. The Citrus Grove case is the firm's defining exhibit — a comprehensive plan amendment whose seventeen stipulations capture the entire substance of Minneola's "shape, don't deny" governance posture. When the corpus references new urbanism, walkable design, or anti-sprawl regulatory defense, Bret Jones, P.A. is often the firm whose name is on the application package. The planning consultancy operates as the ideological spine connecting code-architecture-defensive cities (Clermont with DPZ CoDesign, Groveland with the Eco-Agrarian Code, Minneola via Citrus Grove's stipulation discipline) to the developers building inside those frames.