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.