Brighthill Phase 2

The case file

Three instruments comprise the Brighthill Phase 2 entitlement package:

• Ordinance 2025-26 — voluntary annexation (F.S. § 171.044) of 147.47± acres into the City of Groveland
• Ordinance 2025-27 — large-scale comprehensive plan amendment (F.S. § 163.3184) from Lake County Regional Office and Lake County Rural to City of Groveland Village
• Ordinance 2025-28 — rezoning from Lake County Agriculture and Lake County Planned Commercial to City of Groveland Village Core, Village Center, and Village Edge (the three-zone Village stack)

Location: west of SR-19; east, north, and south of O'Brien Road. Portions sit within the Yalaha-Lake Apopka Rural Protection Area — a Lake County designation explicitly meant to protect rural character. The applicant is EPG Sunstone Holdings LLC.

The vote on the record

December 4, 2025 — Groveland Planning & Zoning Board, three sequential unanimous votes:

• Item 1 (Ord 2025-26 annexation): Unanimous, motion by Crum, second by Kissee-Garcia
• Item 2 (Ord 2025-27 CPA): Unanimous, motion by Kissee-Garcia, second by Crum
• Item 3 (Ord 2025-28 rezoning): Unanimous, motion by Lambert, second by Hoover

Number of public speakers: zero. No public comment was taken on any of the three items, including the 147-acre Village rezoning.

Why the entity matters for the corpus

Brighthill Phase 2 is the largest single annexation-and-rezoning package the Groveland P&Z Board handled in this dataset, and it moved through three unanimous votes with no speakers at the podium. For a city whose synthesis is "Building identity from scratch," this is a 147-acre vote on what that identity looks like, taken in near-silence.

Three structural readings:

1. The Village typology scales without procedural friction. The same three-ordinance template that ran 1.9 acres at Gadson Street in November 2025 ran 147 acres at Brighthill Phase 2 a month later — 78× the parcel size, identical procedural posture. The template is now jurisdiction-neutral on parcel size.
2. The Yalaha-Lake Apopka Rural Protection Area converted directly into city Village land. The CPA moved Lake County's protected designation into Groveland Village in a single ordinance. The rural-protection layer was Lake County's; once annexed, Groveland's land use applies. This is the Grandfather Window thesis at parcel resolution: which jurisdiction's rules are in force when the parcel is locked in.
3. EPG Sunstone Holdings is multi-phase. Phase 2 is on the books, Phase 1 is presumably already in. The Village Core / Village Center / Village Edge tri-zone structure mirrors a master-planned village rather than conventional subdivision lots, so this is a long-horizon development with multiple meetings still to come. Whether Brighthill Phase 2 actually produces a walkable village or another conventional subdivision dressed in village language is the on-the-ground test of Groveland's eco-agrarian thesis.

The watch on Brighthill 3+ phases is implicit; the next ordinance package from EPG Sunstone is the watch trigger.