Strong Towns Clermont
Strong Towns Clermont is the local civic advocacy group co-founded by Commissioner May and launched at a public meeting on August 29, 2025. The organization aligns with the national Strong Towns critique of sprawl-dependent municipal finance — focused on stopping urban sprawl, improving transportation, preserving natural resources, and safer streets. The first public meeting drew on parking and transportation as opening topics. Strong Towns Clermont operates as the external civic-energy layer paired with the Clermont P&Z's reformed-board posture: Commissioner May has used the same period to push for DPZ CoDesign engagement on the comprehensive plan update, advocate for parking reform and pedestrian-friendly design, and bring specific code-language recommendations to LDC amendments. The 1,500+ community survey responses to the downtown comprehensive plan update reflect the civic-energy capacity Strong Towns Clermont represents. This is the South Lake corpus's most visible bridge between board governance and external civic energy.
What's on the record
Launch — August 2025: At the August 5, 2025 Clermont P&Z meeting, Commissioner May introduced Strong Towns Clermont — a new local advocacy group focused on stopping urban sprawl, improving transportation, preserving natural resources, and safer streets. The first public meeting was scheduled for August 29, 2025, 7:00 PM at Clermont City Center. The opening topic was parking and transportation.
Alignment with the Clermont board: Commissioner May co-founded Strong Towns Clermont while serving on the Planning & Zoning Commission. During the same period, May pushed for DPZ CoDesign engagement on the comprehensive plan update, advocated for parking reform and pedestrian-friendly design, and brought specific code-language recommendations to LDC amendments — bringing a national smart-growth ideological frame into local governance.
The civic-energy compound: The downtown comprehensive plan update drew 1,500+ community survey responses — the civic-engagement signal that supports the reformed Clermont P&Z's defensive code architecture. Strong Towns Clermont, the DPZ CoDesign engagement, the Wellness Way Design Standards (2022), and the Pointe Grande ordinance (March 2024) function as a four-leg compound: external civic energy + planning-consultancy expertise + pre-line code architecture + Live Local Act defensive code.
Why this matters for the corpus
Strong Towns Clermont is the South Lake corpus's clearest exhibit of organized external civic-energy paired with reformed-board governance. The national Strong Towns critique — that municipal finance is structurally dependent on sprawl-pattern development that does not pay its own infrastructure costs over the long term — provides the ideological frame for Clermont's defensive code architecture. The advocacy group's existence inside the same year that Clermont denied a 7-Eleven 0-5 at Wellness Way (October 2025), advanced the DPZ CoDesign downtown engagement, and operated under the Wellness Way Design Standards form-based code, is not coincidence. The reformed Clermont P&Z and Strong Towns Clermont are coupled systems. The advocacy group is the visible-public-side of a compound whose dais-side is the Bain / May / Cramer / Hoisington / Tidona transformation of the board. Clermont's Quiet Revolution on Highway 27 is partially externalized as Strong Towns Clermont.