The Citizen-Engineer Substrate: How a handful of unpaid residents became Minneola's de facto technical-review bureau — and what the political philosophy of a system that depends on them reveals

Kevin Carey of 20237 Sugarloaf Mountain Road has spoken at virtually every Minneola Planning and Zoning Commission meeting since at least early 2024. His comments — fire-truck turning radii, stormwater pipe capacity, traffic-signal spacing on Hancock Road, ADA ramp placement, parking-stop bumper geometry, lighting cone luminance — appear in conditions of approval for Pine Ridge, Sunny Ridge, Carla's Sweets, Condev Storage, Cyrene Amenity Center, and most recently the April 2026 Sugarloaf Development drainage outfall. David Yeager of 2750 Purple Meadow Court performs a parallel function focused on pavement and landscape installation. Danielle Duppenthaler delivered 2,213 stop-sign violations counted across 40 days of video at her intersection. The Del Webb HOA presents PowerPoints with crime statistics and 3,086 projected daily trip calculations. These citizens are not commissioners. They are not on staff. They function as an unpaid technical-review bureau in a city whose two-person planning staff cannot otherwise cover that depth. The substrate is load-bearing, fragile against any single departure, invisible at every level except the meeting transcript, and not replicable across cities with larger paid staffs. Reading it surfaces the political-philosophy question buried in small-city governance: what is the legitimacy structure of a planning system that depends on whoever shows up?