Haines City Planning Commission — May 11, 2026

On May 11, 2026, City of Haines City's Planning Commission considered 4 agenda items. **A staff-recommended preliminary plat was DEFEATED — a rare denial that breaks Haines City's frictionless-throughput pattern.** For a board that clears uncontested entitlements at ~90 seconds each, the Lake Eva Estates plat going down despite a staff recommendation of approval is the cycle's loudest signal. The dispute was not density or traffic but **enforceability of conditions** — specifically whether street-tree preservation should be locked into HOA governing documents and whether the plat could be approved against unresolved reports/encumbrances. This echoes the Lake County corridor's "adaptive-reuse-friendly / arterial-density-hostile" filtering: the board is approving the easy commercial pads (Hartford Terrace in January) while getting harder on residential subdivisions whose long-term maintenance obligations are not yet nailed down. The HOA-municipal-interface question — who enforces the street-trees in perpetuity — was the decisive axis. **The Sunshine Law / noticed-action dispute is a governance flashpoint, in the record, in black and white.** The minutes openly document the Deputy City Clerk citing § 286.011 and § 120.525(2) to warn that a board reorganization recorded under "comments" rather than as a noticed action item "risks rendering the action procedurally defective" — and the Chair declining to follow that advice. Published minutes rarely editorialize this directly. For anyone tracking institutional integrity of Polk-cluster boards, this is a clerk asserting statutory discipline against a chair, twice running (the same chair-seat housekeeping was deferred-for-notice back in January). The procedural-defect exposure is now on the public record. **Crossroads Cottages is another County-to-City conversion (RL-4 → MDR / R-3) on the annexation-and-densify track.** A 4.92-acre parcel moving from Polk County RL-4 to City Medium Density Residential and R-3 is the standard Haines City growth mechanism: absorb county land, upzone to city medium density. The board recommended approval unanimously even with the applicant absent — continuing the voluntary-annexation-as-jurisdictional-tool pattern seen across the corridor, where city limits expand parcel by parcel via owner-initiated conversions.