Chairperson Denise Calderon
Chairperson Denise Calderon led the Minneola Planning & Zoning Commission's transition from Chairman Trujillo through the first months of 2026. Calderon began as Alternate Commissioner across 2024 and was a full voting member through 2025; by March 2, 2026 she was acting Chairperson and continued chairing through April 2026 with the active panel reduced to Martin/Bacon/McCoy/Rose/Calderon. Under her chair, the board recorded the first visible 3-2 split (Whispering Winds Amenity Center, March 2, 2026 — Martin/Bacon/Calderon advancing, Rose/McCoy dissenting). She moved with the substantive bench: voted YES on the Saxon Industrial Park variance (April 6, 2026, 4-0) and chaired the Citrus Grove Road Commercial PUD tabling motion (4-0) where Rose moved and McCoy seconded. Calderon's discipline maintains the design-shaping baseline Trujillo established: stipulation-stacking on landscape, lighting, and turf where the bench supports it; conditional approval as the operating norm.
The transition chair
Calderon's chair tenure begins inside a membership transition. The December 1, 2025 minutes still listed Trujillo as Chairman with O'Halloran as a regular member. By March 2, 2026 Calderon is acting Chairperson, O'Halloran is not in the present-list, and the active voting members are Martin/Bacon/McCoy/Rose/Calderon. The chair did not transition through a clean election in the corpus; the chair transitioned through the membership turnover at the missing January 5 and February 2, 2026 meetings (CivicClerk did not have packets uploaded as of harvest date — backfill candidate). Calderon emerges from the transition holding the chair the board now operates under.
The first visible split
The March 2, 2026 Whispering Winds Amenity Center hearing produced the first 3-2 split in recent Minneola corpus memory. Calderon advanced the project with five environmental conditions; Martin and Bacon joined her; Rose and McCoy dissented. The dissent reads as the conservation-vs-property-rights axis activating around landscape, lighting, and turf choices on what is otherwise an in-PUD amenity center. Calderon's posture was stipulation-acceptance: the project passes with conditions Martin pushed for (native/drought-tolerant groundcover, dark-sky compliance for any future lighting). Rose and McCoy positioned as objecting to stipulation-stacking on items already inside approved PUDs.
The substantive Citrus Grove tabling
The April 6, 2026 Citrus Grove Road Commercial PUD tabling motion is procedurally clean (applicant-requested) but the who-moves-what signal is now visible across two consecutive meetings: Rose moves and McCoy seconds the motion to table all three Citrus Grove ordinance/resolution items, preventing any substantive hearing of a 15.878-acre commercial PUD with Tedrow / Lowndes representation. Calderon presides over the procedural posture of the bloc taking position at the gate of the corridor's biggest commercial play. The May 4, 2026 substantive vote will test whether Rose/McCoy hold cohesion under Calderon's chair.
Bidirectional links across the corpus
- Minneola PZC March 2, 2026 — first visible 3-2 split chaired by Calderon
- Minneola PZC April 6, 2026 — Citrus Grove tabling under Calderon's chair