Groveland Community Development Code V5

What CDC V5 is

The Community Development Code Version 5 is the umbrella code-rewrite project that contains Groveland's eco-agrarian regulatory program — not a single ordinance but a systematic attempt to encode a community identity into land-use law. Per the corpus, the rewrite carries:

• The Agrarian Code — Ordinance 2025-25, Section 5.6 of the Community Development Code, the first element to ship as law (front-yard gardens, hand-tendered farms, urban chickens, rain harvesting, rooftop aquaponics, conservation landscapes)
• The Conservation Landscape Code — in draft; tree protection, streetscape planting, native landscaping
• Dark-sky lighting standards — applied as conditions on individual approvals (Palisades, Trinity Lakes) ahead of code-level adoption
• Green-roof regulations — workshopped at 80% coverage and 4-inch soil depth, modeled on Portland's code
• Florida-sourced natural-stone requirements — material-sourcing rules tied to the city's identity claim
• Simplified Community Type standards aligned with a transect model — the form-based backbone
• The Village Core / Village Center / Village Edge tri-zone framework — the typology that Brighthill Phase 2 (147.47 acres, December 2025) was annexed into

Groveland's underlying form-based Community Development Code — the Towns / Villages / Hamlets community types and agrarian-urbanism program recognized by the Congress for New Urbanism — is publicly hosted on Municode. "V5 / Version 5" is the corpus-internal designation for the active rewrite as captured in the city's P&Z code-update workshops; the public-facing city material describes it as a transect-based, nature-integrated "brand new Community Development Code" without a published version number.

How the corpus reads it

CDC V5 ran as a continuous thread across the entire coverage period. The Agrarian Code — its first adopted piece — was first presented January 2024, workshopped through 2024 and into 2025, and debated line-by-line in March 2025 (chickens, ducks, quail, front-yard gardens, rain-harvesting barrels, composting, green roofs) before passing the Planning & Zoning Board 5-0 in October 2025 with apiaries removed for state preemption. The February 2025 board meeting carried both the $154.2M utility-infrastructure presentation and the CDC V5 code-update workshop — the scale of investment and regulatory ambition surfacing in the same room.

The distinction the corpus is careful about: the Agrarian Code (Ordinance 2025-25) is one adopted element; CDC V5 is the whole rewrite, and most of it is still being written. As of the May 2026 dataset the code remains in draft.

Why the entity matters for the corpus

CDC V5 is the cardinal at-risk case in the South Lake corridor's regulatory race. It is the most ambitious form-based code rewrite of the four cities — and it is being drafted under the worst constraint stack of the four:

• The SB 180 freeze — codes adopted after the August 2024 retroactive line are exposed to citizen-plaintiff challenge as "more restrictive or burdensome," with automatic preliminary injunctions and attorney-fee recovery for prevailing plaintiffs. The Agrarian Code (October 2025) sits post-line and exposed; any further CDC V5 element adopted before the freeze lifts inherits the same exposure. This is the Grandfather Window pattern in its most acute form: Clermont's strongest defensive tools (the 2022 Wellness Way Design Standards) are grandfathered pre-line; Groveland's strongest tool is being written post-line.
• The hurricane state-of-emergency moratorium — comprehensive-plan amendments are statutorily frozen, putting the active EAR amendment cycle into suspended animation on top of SB 180.
• A thinning institutional bench — City Attorney Anita Geraci-Carver, the legal voice that tracked SB 180 across every meeting in the record, departed April 2, 2026, mid-cycle, with no announced successor as of May 7; three "interim" titles sit at department-head level. The legal architecture the city most needs ready when the freeze lifts is being drafted by an institution losing the person who understood the freeze best.

The reading is structural. Groveland is running two opposing-direction expansion strategies on the same procedural template — Village Core inward (Brighthill Phase 2), industrial-employment edge outward (Langley Industrial Park) — while the code meant to govern the Village vision is still in draft. The conventional subdivisions already in the pipeline (Brighthill, Cypress Bluff, Lake Deacon, Rainwood, Hidden Ridge) are being built under the existing code. The central question CDC V5 poses: can the code catch the construction before the staff and legal capacity to finish it erodes further?

What resolves it

CDC V5's trajectory is tracked by the Groveland CDC V5 adoption watch item — a condition-triggered watch with no fixed date. It resolves on the first of: the Planning & Zoning Board agendizing CDC V5 for a substantive vote, the City Council adopting the code (or a substantive subset), or the city materially deprioritizing the rewrite in favor of incremental amendments. The outcome assessment captures which Village zones pass first, whether the eco-agrarian recognitions survive into final form, the successor city attorney's role in shaping the code, and the first development application processed under it.