City of Kissimmee Planning Advisory Board Workshop — June 4, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Workshop (noticed as "Planning Advisory Board Workshop") Quorum: Yes (5 of 7 members present) Duration: 6:03 PM – 7:22 PM (1 hour 19 minutes) Location: Kissimmee City Hall, Commission Chambers, 101 Church Street

Attendance

Present: Chairman Robert Bussiere, Board Member Alex Alemi, Board Member Yolanda Bernard, Board Member Rebeca Marin, Board Member Lynda Roth (first appearance in the harvested record)
Absent: Board Member Aaron Sabino, Board Member Diana Marrero-Pinto
Staff Present: Brenda Ryan (Planning Manager), Cristian Arias (Senior Planner), Kalanit Oded (Deputy City Attorney)

No minutes were presented for approval; no old business, new business or public hearings were on the agenda.

Agenda Items

Item 7.A: Board training — Kalanit Oded, Deputy City Attorney

Type: Other (board training / staff presentation, no action)
Case Number: N/A
Location: N/A
Applicant: City Attorney's Office (staff-initiated)
Request: Annual-style legal training for the Planning Advisory Board covering development process, Sunshine and Public Records Law, quasi-judicial proceedings, parliamentary procedure and voting conflicts, and dual office-holding.
Current Zoning: N/A
Proposed Zoning: N/A
Acreage: N/A
Staff Recommendation: N/A — informational
Action: Presentation and discussion only; no vote taken on any substantive matter
Vote: No vote (the only recorded vote was the 5-0 motion to adjourn, moved Marin, seconded Alemi)
Conditions: N/A
Notable Discussion: The minutes record only that "Deputy City Attorney Kalanit Oded gave a presentation on the Sunshine Laws and Roberts Rules." The presentation deck is published with the minutes and is the substantive record. Its content is summarized below because several statements in it govern how every other Kissimmee PAB item in this corpus should be read.

Board authority. The deck states plainly: "The Planning Advisory Board (PAB) is, despite its name, not purely advisory. PAB is the final decision-making body for the City of Kissimmee on applications including Conditional Use Permits with Site Plans and True Works of Art." Members may serve on only one governmental board, excluding ex-officio appointments; non-profit, HOA, COA and corporate boards are unaffected.

Sunshine Law (Fla. Stat. § 286). Applies to advisory boards as well as decision-making boards; only purely fact-finding boards may be exempt. Applies to telephone, electronic and written communications between two or more members, before, during and after meetings, and applies even where no quorum is present and no action can be taken. A physical quorum must be present barring an executive order permitting a virtual quorum; once physical quorum exists, other members may participate and vote remotely if their absence is due to exigent circumstances. Personal liability, criminal penalties, removal from office, fines and attorney's fees are all available remedies. The deck's operational tip: "Do not hit 'reply all' to board emails."

Public Records (Art. I § 24 Fla. Const.; Fla. Stat. § 119). Requests need not be in writing and need not state a purpose. Draft documents, emails, blogs, social media posts and text messages are all public records. City policy allows five business days for production. Members receiving communications on City business by text, email or social media must transmit them to the City Clerk for retention.

Quasi-judicial proceedings. Due process requires reasonable pre-hearing notice, an impartial panel, and a meaningful opportunity to be heard including the ability to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses. Ex parte communications and site visits are presumptively prejudicial and must be disclosed at the beginning of the public hearing. Decisions must rest on competent substantial evidence: staff reports and professional opinions with factual foundations, fact-based lay testimony. Expert testimony is required for traffic, light and noise pollution, and property valuation. The deck cites Katherine's Bay, LLC v. Fagan, 52 So. 3d 19 (Fla. 1st DCA 2010) for the proposition that lay speculation about traffic, light and noise, or home devaluation, is not competent substantial evidence, and lists denials overturned on that basis — an airport conditional use, an adult congregate living facility, a gas station, an apartment complex, and a guest house denied on a neighborhood "popularity poll."

Voting conflicts (Fla. Stat. § 112.3143). PAB members are public officers and may not vote on any matter they know would inure to their special private gain or loss, or that of a relative, employer or business associate. Abstention requires publicly stating the nature of the interest before the vote and filing a written disclosure memo within 15 days, which is then incorporated into the minutes as a public record.

Parliamentary procedure. The deck covers motions, seconds, amendments (an amendment must be voted before the original motion) and postponement, and states that rules of procedure in charters, ordinances and City policies supersede the parliamentary authority in a conflict.

Public Hearings Summary

Number of speakers: 0 — no public hearings were noticed on this workshop agenda.
General sentiment: Not applicable.
Key concerns: None recorded.

Key Signals

The City Attorney told the board on the record that it is not an advisory board. "The Planning Advisory Board (PAB) is, despite its name, not purely advisory. PAB is the final decision-making body for the City of Kissimmee on applications including Conditional Use Permits with Site Plans." That single line reframes the whole docket. Every conditional-use approval this board issues — the UCP charter school, the W. Vine drive-thru, the John Young Parkway food-truck market and motorcycle dealership — is a final municipal decision, not a recommendation to the Commission. For an applicant or an objector, the PAB hearing is the hearing.
Because those hearings are quasi-judicial and final, the evidence rules bind residents hardest. The training walks the board through Katherine's Bay v. Fagan and a list of conditional-use denials overturned on appeal because they rested on neighbors' testimony about traffic, noise, light or property values. In Kissimmee, a resident who shows up to oppose a project and speaks about traffic has produced, as a matter of law, no evidence at all. Expert testimony is required for traffic, light and noise, and property valuation. Opposition without a hired expert is procedurally weightless.
Ex parte contact and site visits are presumptively prejudicial and must be disclosed at the top of the hearing. No Kissimmee PAB meeting in the harvested period records a single ex parte disclosure. Either members are having no outside contact about pending applications on a board with a heavy conditional-use docket, or the disclosures are not making the record.
Dual office-holding was covered because it constrains who can serve — and this board is chronically short of members. Members may sit on only one governmental board. In a period where the PAB cancelled roughly half its meetings for lack of quorum and staff put attendance on a September agenda, a constitutional limit on how many civic seats a willing volunteer can occupy is a real recruitment constraint, not a footnote.
Lynda Roth appears for the first time at this workshop; Robert Spalding does not appear again after May 7. The training session is where the roster turns over. A board learning its quasi-judicial obligations in June with two members absent and one brand new is the board that approved a 161.8-acre PUD amendment ten weeks later.

Raw Notes

Source provenance: minutes PDF published to CivicClerk as file 8482 ("06.04.2025 PAB Workshop Minutes") under agenda 1930, event 2249. The published file is a composite: pages 1–2 are the signed workshop minutes (scanned images, recovered by OCR), pages 3–48 are the Deputy City Attorney's training slide deck (native text). No separate agenda packet was published for this meeting; the agenda is file 8306, headed "SESSION OF THE PLANNING ADVISORY BOARD WORKSHOP."
The minutes document is headed "MEETING WORKSHOP." The agenda's own appeal notice refers to "the Planning Advisory Board Workshop" as the deciding body.
The minutes summarize the presentation as covering "the Sunshine Laws and Roberts Rules." The deck's actual scope is broader — process and DRC, Sunshine, Public Records, quasi-judicial proceedings, parliamentary procedure, voting conflicts and dual office-holding.
The deck names the Development Review Committee (DRC) as an example of a staff body that is subject to Sunshine because it is a decision-making committee.
Contact given in the deck for member questions: kalanit.oded@kissimmee.gov, (407) 518-2310.
Adjournment 7:22 PM on a 5-0 motion. Signed by the Board Chairman and Board Secretary.
These minutes were approved at the August 20, 2025 meeting, 5-0.

Kissimmee Planning Advisory Board — June 4, 2025 minutes