City of Lake Wales Planning and Zoning Board — May 26, 2026

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (7 of 7 members present) Duration: Approximately 42 minutes (5:30 PM – 6:12 PM)

Companion document. The May 26, 2026 agenda was harvested earlier at 2026-05-agenda-PZB.md, with the full staff reports. These are the signed minutes, published to the AgendaCenter after that harvest and approved by the Board on June 23, 2026. Read together they close the loop: what staff recommended, and what the Board actually did.

Attendance

• Present: Chairperson Kyra Love, Vice Chair Bud Colburn, Roy Wilkinson, Casey McKibben, Eric Rio, Scott Blackburn, Mark Bennett (all seven members)
• Absent: None
• Staff Present: Autumn Cochella (Growth Management Director), Shannon Hancock (Development Coordinator)

Agenda Items

Item 3: Approval of Minutes — Regular Board Meeting March 24, 2026

• Type: Procedural (minutes approval)
• Action: Approved as written
• Vote: Unanimous (Rio moved, Colburn seconded)
• Notable Discussion: This closes the March 24, 2026 draft minutes, which the corpus previously carried only as a draft embedded in this packet.

Item 6: Board Member Reappointment — Bud Colburn

• Type: Other (board appointment)
• Applicant: Bueford "Bud" Colburn, incumbent Vice Chair
• Request: Recommend reappointment to the Planning and Zoning Board.
• Action: Reappointment recommended to the Mayor
• Vote: Unanimous consensus (Rio moved, Bennett seconded)
• Notable Discussion: Cochella explained the mechanism — the Mayor makes board appointments, and prefers a recommendation from the sitting board.

Item 7: Capo, 10 1st Street S — SEUP for Outdoor Display and Sales (Taco Truck)

• Type: SEUP (outdoor display and sales as an accessory use)
• Case Number: PID 273002-907000-001321
• Location: 10 1st Street S, Lake Wales
• Applicant: Melinda Kalogridis, authorized agent for owner Capo Security Inc.
• Request: SEUP allowing a taco truck to remain permanently on site with outdoor covered seating and sandwich-board signage.
• Staff Recommendation: Deny — the applicant "did not attempt to satisfy the listed conditions of approval as defined by the Planning and Zoning Board on February 24, 2026."
• Action: Pulled from the agenda — no hearing held, no vote taken
• Notable Discussion: The February 24, 2026 approval carried a three-month trial period and seven conditions; staff reported the applicant had not been in communication with the City. Pulling the item rather than taking the denial leaves the February grant, and its trial-period clock, as the operative record. As of the July 23, 2026 meeting the item had not returned to a P&Z agenda.

Item 8: 107 Crystal Ave — SEUP for Personal Services and Retail in the LCI District

• Type: SEUP (personal services + retail in LCI)
• Case Number: PID 273001-883000-022080
• Location: 107 Crystal Ave (0.45 acres)
• Applicant: Claribel Marin, owner
• Request: Permit approximately 2,337 square feet of personal-service and retail business area in the LCI district, with a waiver of strict compliance for the east parking lot.
• Current Zoning: LCI
• Staff Recommendation: Approve with a waiver of strict compliance (gravel/asphalt millings in lieu of paving) and eight conditions
• Action: Approved with a modified waiver
• Vote: 7-0 (Bennett moved, Blackburn seconded; all seven members Yes)
• Conditions: Staff's conditions of approval, with the waiver changed: instead of the paving-material waiver, the Board granted a reduction in required parking from 17 spaces to 12, two of which must be handicap/ADA.
• Notable Discussion: Hancock presented; Cochella expanded on the request; the owner explained the parking layout. The Board substituting a different waiver than the one staff proposed is the substantive move here — it traded a surface-material concession for a smaller paved footprint with enforced ADA provision.

Item 9: McGowin's on Park — SEUP for Indoor Amusement in the D-MU District

• Type: SEUP (indoor amusement / event space)
• Location: 247 E. Park Avenue (former Ranch Café building, downtown)
• Applicant: Bill Whidden, owner
• Request: Indoor Amusement SEUP for a rehearsal-dinner and boutique event space in the Downtown Mixed-Use district.
• Current Zoning: D-MU Downtown Mixed-Use
• Staff Recommendation: Approve — downtown public parking supply (267–471 spaces within 500–600 feet) exceeds the ~38 spaces a sold-out event would need
• Action: Approved
• Vote: 7-0 (Colburn moved, Blackburn seconded; all seven members Yes)
• Notable Discussion: Bennett asked about outdoor seating; Whidden said city parks and open areas are rentable via an event permit. Whidden described the wedding-venue business that feeds the concept and the visitor spending it brings into town. Joy Pruitt, Executive Director of Lake Wales Main Street, spoke in support, framing the venue as a downtown-business driver. Robin Gibson, a downtown resident, said he had no concerns, spoke about preserving the city's small-town character, described his current position with the City, and compared Whidden's business to "the hotel's business, a destination" — praising the quality of that hotel's renovations. Gibson was appointed to this board four weeks later.

Item 10: Hickory Ridge — FLUM Amendment and Zoning Map Amendment

• Type: Comp Plan Amendment (Future Land Use Map) + Rezoning (Zoning Map)
• Case Number: Ordinance 2026-15 (FLUM) / Ordinance 2026-16 (Zoning)
• Location: ~47 acres north of SR 60 and west of Capps Road — the Hickory Ridge Estates platted subdivision
• Applicant: City Planning Staff (city-initiated)
• Request: Assign City land use LDR Low Density Residential and City zoning R-1B to land annexed in July 2025.
• Proposed Zoning: R-1B Residential
• Acreage: ~47 acres
• Staff Recommendation: Approve
• Action: Approved
• Vote: 7-0 (Bennett moved to accept the staff recommendation, Wilkinson seconded; all seven members Yes)
• Notable Discussion: Cochella presented the location and project history. This is the re-noticed run of the item the Board first heard March 24, 2026, when Bennett flagged a legal-advertisement defect (parcel IDs missing the subdivision number). The clean 7-0 on the cured ordinances is what a defensible record looks like.

Item 11: Ordinance 2026-11 — Library Impact Fees

• Type: Text Amendment / Ordinance (impact fee)
• Case Number: Ordinance 2026-11
• Location: Citywide
• Applicant: City of Lake Wales (city-initiated)
• Request: Adopt a library impact fee.
• Action: Recommended for adoption to City Commission
• Vote: 7-0 (Rio moved, Colburn seconded; all seven members Yes)
• Notable Discussion: Cochella presented; no public speakers. Two months later the same board recommended repealing Section 23-781, the automatic annual CPI escalator on all impact fees, on the City Attorney's advice that Florida law bars raising impact fees more than once every four years (Ordinance 2026-24, July 23, 2026).

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 2 (both on Item 9, McGowin's on Park)
• General sentiment: Supportive
• Key concerns: None raised in opposition. Joy Pruitt (Lake Wales Main Street) framed the venue as aligned with downtown revitalization; Robin Gibson framed the test as whether a business preserves the city's small-town character.

Key Signals

• Every substantive item passed 7-0 — and the one item staff wanted denied never got a vote. The Board approved three items unanimously with a full seven-member roll call, and the Capo taco-truck SEUP, the only item carrying a staff recommendation of denial, was pulled from the agenda. That leaves the February 24, 2026 grant — a three-month trial with seven conditions — as the standing record, and no revocation on the books. The forward-looking read in the agenda harvest, that this case might close with revocation, did not happen: as of July 23, 2026 the item has not returned. Watch for it on a fall agenda.

• The Board rewrote the waiver rather than accepting staff's. At 107 Crystal Ave, staff proposed a waiver letting the owner surface the east lot in gravel and millings. Bennett's motion instead cut required parking from 17 spaces to 12 with two ADA spaces mandated. Same approval, different concession — a smaller impervious footprint and an accessibility floor in place of a cheaper surface. This is a board that edits the terms of approval rather than voting the package up or down, and it is the second month running that a Lake Wales approval carried a board-authored modification (compare the January 13 reduction of a three-year SEUP term to one year).

• The downtown thesis got its endorsement on the record. McGowin's on Park passed 7-0 with the Executive Director of Lake Wales Main Street testifying for it and Robin Gibson describing the downtown hotel's renovation quality. Gibson's distinction — this venue is a destination like the hotel, as opposed to highway trade — is the same frame he used a month later to separate the Walesbilt from the US-27 highway hotel. Downtown Lake Wales is being underwritten as a destination district by the people who will vote on its permits.

• Hickory Ridge's clean 7-0 completes a notice cure. The March 24 hearing surfaced a legal-advertisement defect; the item returned as Ordinances 2026-15 and 2026-16 and passed without dissent. In an SB 180 environment where every post-August-2024 comprehensive-plan amendment is challengeable through mid-2028, re-noticing rather than papering over a defect is the cheapest litigation insurance a small city can buy. Lake Wales is the corpus's clearest example of that discipline.

• A new impact fee in May, a repeal of the escalator in July. The Board recommended adopting a library impact fee on May 26 and, on July 23, recommended repealing Section 23-781 — the provision that automatically raised all impact fees each October by the construction cost index — because §163.31801(6)(e), Florida Statutes, permits an increase only once every four years. Read together, Lake Wales is trading a small automatic annual ratchet for a single large recalibration (a Raftelis impact-fee study due later in 2026). Anyone modeling development cost in Lake Wales should expect a step change, not a drift.

Raw Notes

• Minutes are a 6-page image-only scan recovered by OCR; the corresponding agenda packet, with all staff reports, was harvested to 2026-05-agenda-PZB.md on 2026-06-04.
• Staff title shift confirmed in these minutes: Shannon Hancock signs as Development Coordinator (she appeared as Recording Secretary through the January 27, 2026 minutes).
• Closing announcements: Cochella reported she is still coordinating with City Horticulturist Kevin Polk on the landscape-code review the Board asked for (Polk has large projects in flight); and that she has budgeted funds in the next fiscal year to live-stream Planning & Zoning Board meetings. Lake Wales P&Z currently has no video archive — Granicus carries City Commission and CRA only — so a live stream would be the first video record of this board's proceedings.
• The June 23, 2026 minutes record approval of these minutes; the OCR of that later document renders the date as "May 28," a scan artifact — the agenda packet's own table of contents lists "Regular Board Meeting May 26, 2026 / 5.26.2026 DRAFT MINUTES.PDF."
• Item numbering in the minutes matches the agenda: items 1–5 are procedural, substantive items run 6–11.