City of Haines City Planning Commission — July 13, 2026 (Agenda)

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Not applicable — pre-meeting agenda record. No attendance, actions, or votes are available. Duration: Not applicable

Attendance

Present: [not available — agenda record]
Absent: [not available — agenda record]
Staff Present: [not available]. Named staff on the packet: Calvin Clarke, Planner, Development Services (staff contact, Item 5.a); Grace Malpartida, Planner (staff contact, Items 5.b and 5.c, and author of all three staff reports); Sharon Lauther, MMC, City Clerk (Item 4); Derek "Ted" Adkins, Development Services Deputy Director (routing on Item 5.a); Richard Greenwood, Development Services Director (routing on Items 5.b and 5.c).

Agenda Items

Item 4: Minutes to Accept — Planning Commission, June 8, 2026

Type: Other (procedural — acceptance of prior minutes)
Case Number: —
Location: —
Applicant: —
Request: Accept the prior Planning Commission minutes. The agenda line reads "June 06, 2026 - Planning Commission Meeting"; the attached PDF is "Post-Meeting Minutes - Planning_Jun08_2026 - English.pdf."
Staff Recommendation: Accept
Action: [not available — agenda]
Vote: [not available — agenda]

Item 5.a: Land Development Regulations Text Amendments

Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Regulations)
Case Number: Not assigned in the agenda; packet document titled "Land Development Regulations Text Amendments 2026"
Location: Citywide
Applicant: City staff (Development Services)
Request: Amend LDR Chapter 4 (Definitions), Chapter 5 (Zoning), Chapter 6 (Special Provisions), Chapter 20 (Appeals, Conditional Uses, Variances, Procedures, Limitations), and Chapter 21 (Amending the Land Development Regulations; Maps).
Current Zoning: —
Proposed Zoning: —
Acreage: Citywide
Staff Recommendation: Forward a recommendation of approval to the City Commission
Action: [not available — agenda]
Vote: [not available — agenda]
Conditions: —
Scheduled for consideration (Exhibit A, as filed):
- Chapter 4, § 4.2.1 Terms — add and define: Air pump station(s) ("a publicly accessible air compressor designed for motorists to inflate vehicle tires"); Car wash; Electric vehicle (EV) station; Fuel station ("a retail facility or device that dispenses motor vehicle fuels"); Public service ("any activity, service, or employment provided to support the well-being of a community").
- Chapter 5, § 5.2.1 Fences, walls, hedges and architectural features — clarify fence location where a rear yard abuts a subdivision common area; remove the fence permit requirement (subsection A.6, "All fences shall require a permit," struck to RESERVED); move barbed wire and razor wire fencing in industrial districts from "conditional use permit" to "administrative conditional use." Exhibit text states: "The amendments to fences are effective immediately."
- Chapter 6, § 6.1.7 MUPUD (Mixed Use Planned Unit Development) — add service stations as an administrative conditional use in the MUPUD district, per § 5.2.6 and subject to four conditions: (i) no car wash as an accessory use; (ii) no fueling stations for commercial vehicles; (iii) EV charging station(s) required; (iv) free air pump station(s) required "as a public service." Administrative conditional uses are "permitted by waiver granted by the administrative official, with denials of an administrative waiver appealable to the city commission."
- Chapter 20 — create Article 3, Administrative Conditional Uses (§§ 20.3.1 Authority; Intent and 20.3.2 Procedure), vesting authority to hear, decide, condition, or deny in the administrative official; reorder the chapter's article and section numbering. Article 4 (Variances, board of adjustment) and Article 5 (Administrative Waivers — administrative official may authorize up to a 25 percent reduction in setbacks, height, parking, buffering, and related zoning standards on an infill plan) are restated.
- Chapter 21, § 21.1.7 Limitations on amendments, subsection D — remove the supermajority requirement. Current text: "If the recommendation of the planning commission is adverse to any proposed change, such change shall not become effective except by the affirmative vote of four members of the city commission." Exhibit A strikes it to RESERVED.
Stated rationale (staff report, verbatim): "Upon review of several sections of the Land Development Regulations, staff determined that amendments were needed in order to comply with the provisions of recent Florida State legislation such as Senate Bill 180 and House Bill 803, among others." The report attributes no individual amendment to any specific statutory provision.

Item 5.b: Small Scale Land Use Amendment for 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road

Type: Comp Plan Amendment (small-scale future land use)
Case Number: Not assigned in the agenda
Location: 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road, Haines City. Polk County Property Appraiser Parcel Number 272632709500030190.
Applicant: Applicant-initiated; the site is St. Cyril the Great Coptic Orthodox Church
Request: Small-scale land use amendment of 3.87± acres from County Professional Institute (PI) to City Professional Office/Institute in the North Ridge (PIC-NR).
Current Zoning / FLU: Polk County Professional Institute (PI)
Proposed FLU: City Professional Office/Institute in the North Ridge (PIC-NR)
Acreage: 3.87± acres
Staff Recommendation: Forward a recommendation for approval to the City Commission
Action: [not available — agenda]
Vote: [not available — agenda]
Conditions: None proposed
Scheduled discussion: Staff report states the site "is currently a place of worship named St. Cyril the Great Coptic Orthodox Church and has plans to expand as the congregation size increases," and that the project "is compatible with the surrounding area and will abide by the comprehensive plan standards." A vicinity map is attached to the packet.

Item 5.c: Zoning Map Amendment for 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road

Type: Rezoning (zoning map amendment)
Case Number: Not assigned in the agenda
Location: 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road. Parcel 272632709500030190.
Applicant: Applicant-initiated (St. Cyril the Great Coptic Orthodox Church site)
Request: Zoning map amendment of 3.87± acres from County Professional Institute (PI) to City Professional Office/Institute in the North Ridge (PIC-NR).
Current Zoning: Polk County Professional Institute (PI)
Proposed Zoning: City Professional Office/Institute in the North Ridge (PIC-NR)
Acreage: 3.87± acres
Staff Recommendation: Forward a recommendation for approval to the City Commission
Action: [not available — agenda]
Vote: [not available — agenda]
Conditions: None proposed
Scheduled discussion: Companion zoning case to Item 5.b, same parcel, same acreage, same church-expansion purpose.

Public Hearings Summary

[Not available — pre-meeting agenda record. No speakers, sentiment, or concerns are on the record. Items 5.a through 5.c are recommendation items forwarded to the City Commission.]

Key Signals

The July docket deletes the City Commission's supermajority threshold for overruling this Planning Commission — the board's dissent becomes procedurally free to ignore. LDR § 21.1.7(D) currently requires four affirmative City Commission votes before a change the Planning Commission recommended against can take effect. Exhibit A strikes that subsection to RESERVED. Two months earlier, on May 11, 2026, this board defeated a staff-recommended preliminary plat (Lake Eva Estates) — the only denial against a staff recommendation in the harvested Haines City record. The code amendment that removes the sole structural consequence of a Planning Commission "no" is now on the board's own docket, and the staff report ties no specific statute to it. Cross-corpus, this is the Board Abolition Over Board Override pattern at a third and cheapest setting: Winter Springs overrode its PZB case by case (Wawa, October 2025, 5-0 over a joint board-and-staff denial); Lake County dissolved its Board of Adjustment outright effective July 1, 2026; Haines City keeps the board intact and deletes the cost of disagreeing with it.
Gas stations move out of the public hearing and onto a staff desk in mixed-use districts — priced in EV chargers and free air. Chapter 6 § 6.1.7 adds service stations to the MUPUD district as an administrative conditional use, granted by the administrative official with denials appealable to the City Commission, and Chapter 20's new Article 3 builds the procedure that makes such approvals possible generally. A fuel station in a mixed-use PUD would no longer require a Planning Commission hearing. The four attached conditions are the corpus's first mandated public-service exaction on fuel retail: no accessory car wash, no commercial-vehicle fueling, EV charging stations required, and free air pump stations required "as a public service." The Bellwether Gas Station pattern treats gateway fuel proposals as the diagnostic of a board's substantive-review posture; Haines City is removing that diagnostic from the board's docket while attaching electrification conditions to the use.
Fence permits disappear, twelve days after HB 803 took effect. Chapter 5 § 5.2.1(A)(6) — "All fences shall require a permit" — is struck to RESERVED, with the exhibit noting "The amendments to fences are effective immediately." Governor DeSantis signed HB 803 (Building Permits and Inspections) on May 6, 2026, effective July 1, 2026; it bars local governments from requiring building permits for qualifying single-family residential work valued under $7,500, the band most residential fencing occupies. Homeowners on Watts Dairy Road and across the city would stop pulling fence permits. Barbed and razor wire in industrial districts move from a conditional use permit to an administrative conditional use in the same edit.
Every substantive change in the package loosens — under a statute that only permits loosening. Staff's blanket rationale names Senate Bill 180 and House Bill 803. SB 180 (Chapter 2025-190) bars covered Florida local governments from adopting or enforcing land-development regulations more restrictive or burdensome than those in force August 1, 2024, with the moratorium running to October 1, 2027 and the session law expiring June 30, 2028 — and the 2024 hurricane declarations put all of Polk County in scope. Under that freeze a code-maintenance cycle can only subtract. What travels bundled with the compliance items is discretionary: the supermajority deletion, the new administrative-conditional-use channel, and the restated 25 percent administrative waiver of setbacks, height, parking, and buffering. The same mechanism appears at Lake County's May 6, 2026 PZB agenda, where § 163.3202 preemption carried the removal of Haines Creek Estates PUD design standards. Compliance is the frame; the payload is broader than the mandate.
Two small church-expansion conversions, and no subdivision — the second consecutive sub-five-acre docket. 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road moves 3.87± acres from County Professional Institute to City Professional Office/Institute in the North Ridge so St. Cyril the Great Coptic Orthodox Church can expand as its congregation grows. Paired with June's 4.92-acre Crossroads Townhomes conversion, that is two months running of small applicant-initiated County-to-City absorptions with no preliminary plat on the docket — a visible cooling from the 2025 cycle, which carried White Clay (767 lots), Scenic Terrace North (357 lots), and Marion Groves (120 lots). The "North Ridge" suffix places the parcel inside the same overlay designation used for RWS Ranch (R-3-NR, October 2025), which remains the city's active growth quadrant.

Raw Notes

This is a pre-meeting agenda record. Actions, votes, attendance, public testimony, and discussion are not available. No Post-Meeting Minutes PDF for July 13, 2026 exists in the pub-hainescity eScribe tenant as of 2026-08-08. Haines City's publication pattern places each meeting's minutes on the following meeting's page; no August 2026 Planning Commission meeting is published, so the July 13 minutes have no page to appear on yet. Re-harvest when the next PC meeting posts.
Source set: agenda packet FileStream.ashx?DocumentId=31367 (19 pp. — agenda, June 8 2026 minutes, LDR text-amendment staff report, Exhibit A, both 2115 Holly Hill Fruit Road staff reports, vicinity map); agenda cover FileStream.ashx?DocumentId=31368 (2 pp.). Meeting page: Meeting.aspx?Id=b202f22b-830b-4ee5-967b-132a7d2bc454. Individual attachments on the meeting page: DocumentIds 31358–31364 and 31366.
Agenda date typo: Item 4 lists the minutes to accept as "June 06, 2026 - Planning Commission Meeting"; the attached file is Post-Meeting Minutes - Planning_Jun08_2026 - English.pdf. The meeting was June 8.
Staff-report routing differs within one packet: Item 5.a is routed "Through: Derek 'Ted' Adkins, Development Services Deputy Director"; Items 5.b and 5.c are routed "Through: Richard Greenwood, Development Services Director." All three are authored "From: Grace Malpartida," while the agenda names Calvin Clarke as staff contact for 5.a.
Exhibit A restates unchanged material alongside the edits. Chapter 20 Article 4 (variances; board of adjustment; § 20.4.5 four-member concurring vote; § 20.4.4 one-year bar on repeat petitions) and Article 5 (administrative waivers, citing Ord. No. 12-1417 § 12, 3-15-2012 and Ord. No. 23-2041 § 1(Exh. A), 5-18-2023) appear largely as-is; the noted change for Chapter 20 is the creation of Article 3 and the renumbering of the chapter.
Chapter 21 retains § 21.1.7(C): rezonings not extending an existing district boundary still require at least 40,000 sq ft of area and 200 ft of continuous, contiguous street frontage on the same side of the street. Only subsection D is struck.
The MUPUD service-station amendment cross-references § 5.2.6 of the LDR, which is not reproduced in Exhibit A. The specific service-station regulations that would apply are outside this packet.
Board composition context for the vote that would have occurred: the June 8, 2026 meeting seated four of seven members (bare quorum) with Chair Louie McLean and Charles Anderson absent. Whether the July 13 board reached quorum, and how it voted on a text amendment reducing its own leverage, is unknown until minutes publish.

Haines City Planning Commission — July 13, 2026 agenda