City of Lake Wales Planning and Zoning Board — June 23, 2026

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (5 of 7 members present) Duration: Approximately 53 minutes (5:30 PM – 6:23 PM)

Composite. Actions and votes are from the signed minutes (image-only scan, recovered by OCR); case detail, acreage, and staff recommendations are from the June 23, 2026 agenda packet (40 pages).

Attendance

• Present: Chairperson Kyra Love, Vice Chair Bud Colburn, Casey McKibben, Scott Blackburn, Mark Bennett
• Absent: Roy Wilkinson, Eric Rio (both notified the secretary before the meeting; quorum maintained)
• Staff Present: Autumn Cochella (Growth Management Director), Shannon Hancock (Development Coordinator)

Agenda Items

Item 3: Approval of Minutes — Regular Board Meeting May 26, 2026

• Type: Procedural (minutes approval)
• Action: Approved
• Vote: Unanimous (Colburn moved, Blackburn seconded)

Item 5: New Business — Request to Amend Section 23-205 (Board Alternates); Annual Officer Elections

• Type: Text Amendment (initiated from the dais) + procedural
• Applicant: Vice Chair Bud Colburn
• Request: Colburn asked staff to examine Chapter 23, Section 23-205 Planning Board and research whether it can be amended to add one alternate member to the Board.
• Action: Direction to staff — and the ordinance came back for a hearing four weeks later as Ordinance 2026-27 (July 23, 2026).
• Notable Discussion: Hancock raised the code-required annual vote for chairman. Colburn nominated Kyra Love for re-election as Chair (McKibben seconded) — unanimous. The Board then elected a vice chair in the same sitting to keep the annual votes aligned: Love nominated Bud Colburn (Bennett seconded) — unanimous.

Item 6: Board Member Appointment — Ralph Marino

• Type: Other (board appointment)
• Applicant: Ralph Marino
• Request: Recommendation to the Mayor for appointment to the Planning and Zoning Board.
• Action: Recommended (jointly with Item 7)
• Vote: Unanimous (Bennett moved to recommend both Marino and Gibson to the Mayor; all present in favor)
• Notable Discussion: Cochella noted the Board's votes are recommendations only — the Mayor makes appointments. Marino introduced himself and described his due diligence and history in Lake Wales.

Item 7: Board Member Appointment — Robin Gibson

• Type: Other (board appointment)
• Applicant: Robin Gibson
• Request: Recommendation to the Mayor for appointment to the Planning and Zoning Board.
• Action: Recommended (same motion as Item 6)
• Vote: Unanimous
• Notable Discussion: Cochella spoke to Gibson's history in Lake Wales and his current position with the City. Gibson arrived mid-meeting and explained why he wanted the seat. Colburn remarked on having multiple candidates willing to serve; Bennett observed that former commissioners and elected members make good planning board members. Gibson had testified as a member of the public at the May 26 meeting. He appears on the July 23, 2026 roster in the seat previously held by Roy Wilkinson; Marino does not appear on that roster.

Item 8: Hunt Club Grove — Major Modification to a Residential PDP Special Exception Use Permit

• Type: PUD / PDP amendment (major modification)
• Case Number: PIDs 283007-000000-044010, 283007-000000-042000, 283018-000000-033010, 283018-000000-031030 (Hunt Club South)
• Location: Approximately 104 acres west of Hunt Brothers Road and south of Post Salter Road
• Applicant: Dave Schmitt, P.E., authorized agent for owner; Lennar Homes is the builder driving the request
• Request: Remove Condition of Approval "e" from the May 17, 2022 City Commission PDP approval — the requirement that garages on all 40-foot-wide lots be recessed from the front building expression line unless oriented away from the street — so Lennar can substitute newly proposed models with projecting garages.
• Acreage: ~104 acres
• Staff Recommendation: Deny — "the applicant has not demonstrated that removing the condition will improve the quality of the neighborhood."
• Action: Pulled from the agenda — no hearing, no vote
• Notable Discussion: The 2022 approval carried ten conditions, of which condition "e" is one of four explicitly about street-facing form (the others: fences set back 15 feet behind the front building expression line, anti-monotony standards, and staggered front setbacks of at least two feet between adjacent lots). This is the same design-standard fight the Board ran against CBD Land Investors in January — a builder asking to swap out the product form that earned the entitlement.

Item 9: Lake Wales Hotel (Ridge Way) — Zoning Map Amendment and Major Site Plan

• Type: Rezoning (Ordinance 2026-22) + Major Site Plan
• Case Number: Ordinance 2026-22; PID 272916864751000120
• Location: A 5-acre vacant parcel along Ridge Way, north of the Eagle Ridge Mall, adjacent to the existing Kohl's department store on US Highway 27
• Applicant: Matthew Johnson, P.E., JSK Consulting, authorized agent for owner (property under new ownership)
• Request: Major Site Plan approval for a 14,300-square-foot hotel plus two 8,250-square-foot commercial outparcels and associated parking, built in two phases; and rezone the rear 2± acres from R-1B Residential to C-3 Highway Commercial to match the rest of the site.
• Current Zoning: C-3 Highway Commercial (~3 acres) and R-1B Residential (~2 acres) — future land use RAC Regional Activity Center across the whole parcel
• Proposed Zoning: C-3 Highway Commercial
• Acreage: 5 acres (rezoning applies to ~2 acres; the rear 1.7 acres carries the R-1B split)
• Staff Recommendation: Approve the Major Site Plan with conditions; recommend approval of the rezoning to City Commission. Staff findings: within the City utility service area, consistent with the RAC future land use, permitted in C-3, no waivers of strict compliance requested.
• Action: Approved (site plan) with a recommendation of approval to City Commission (rezoning)
• Vote: 5-0 (Colburn moved, Blackburn seconded; Love, Colburn, McKibben, Blackburn, Bennett all Yes)
• Conditions: A detailed landscaping plan and schedule, including a tree removal and replacement plan, must be submitted for City review and approval.
• Notable Discussion: The hotel is designed at 45 feet — 10 feet above the C-3 district's 35-foot maximum — using the code's one-foot-of-added-setback-per-foot-of-height trade. The staff report discloses that staff is simultaneously advancing an LDR amendment to raise the C-3 maximum to 45 feet by right (that is Item 10 below). Robin Gibson, speaking from the floor, drew the distinction that has become the city's operating frame: the Walesbilt is a destination hotel, this is a highway hotel, and in his reading they do not compete. Note the staff report's own internal inconsistency on which side of US-27 the site sits — the synopsis says east of US 27, the background says the west side adjacent to Kohl's.

Item 10: Ordinance 2026-21 — Amendments to Chapter 23 Land Development Regulations

• Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Regulations)
• Case Number: Ordinance 2026-21
• Location: Citywide (Table 23-421 Permitted Uses; Table 23-422B Dimensional and Area Standards)
• Applicant: City Planning Staff
• Request: Two changes. (1) Allow a convenience store with gasoline sales as a permitted use (P) in the I-1 Industrial district. (2) Raise the maximum building height in the C-3 Highway Commercial and BP Business Park districts from 35 feet to 45 feet.
• Staff Recommendation: Approve — a convenience/fuel use supports industrial activity and fits the comprehensive plan's allowance for up to 15% commercial serving employees in an IND area; 45 feet is already permitted in PF, D-MU, C-1, and I-1, accommodates a standard hotel, and drew no objection from the Fire Marshal at the Development Review Committee.
• Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission
• Vote: 5-0 (McKibben moved, Colburn seconded; Love, Colburn, McKibben, Blackburn, Bennett all Yes)
• Notable Discussion: The staff report names both drivers by project. The gas-station change was requested by "a land owner along State Road 60 West, adjacent to the Stoneridge Master Planned project and the Lake Wales Municipal Airport" who "is interested in entitling land for future industrial development" — the same ownership that brought the 193-acre SR 60 Industrial annexation and FLUM/zoning request to the Board four weeks later. The height change was driven by two hotels: "one in the Longleaf Business Park on US Highway 27, and one along Ridge Way north of the Eagle Ridge Mall."

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 1 (Robin Gibson, on Item 9)
• General sentiment: Supportive
• Key concerns: None in opposition. Gibson's comment was a positioning argument — that a highway hotel and the downtown Walesbilt occupy different markets and do not compete for the same guest.

Key Signals

• The code was amended for the projects before the projects were heard. Ordinance 2026-21's own staff report names its beneficiaries: a landowner on SR 60 West by the municipal airport who wants industrial entitlements, and two specific hotels needing 45 feet. Four weeks later the same landowner's 193-acre SR 60 Industrial annexation came before the Board, and the Ridge Way hotel had already been approved at 45 feet under the existing setback-trade provision. This is the corpus's cleanest single-city instance of the pre-coding sequence — amend the permitted-use table and the height table first, then bring the entitlement. It is the same mechanism as Minneola's data-center ordinance and the SB 954 recovery-residence pre-coding, run for industrial and hospitality instead.

• Lake Wales has three hotels in play at once, in two different markets. The staff report for Ordinance 2026-21 names a hotel in the Longleaf Business Park on US-27 and this one on Ridge Way by the Eagle Ridge Mall; Robin Gibson and Bill Whidden both spoke to the downtown Walesbilt renovation in May. For a city of roughly 17,000, three concurrent hotel projects is a demand signal — and the Board is explicitly reading them as non-competing: highway trade on US-27, destination trade downtown.

• A second builder tried to strip a design condition, and the item vanished before the vote. Lennar, through Dave Schmitt, asked to delete the recessed-garage condition from the 2022 Hunt Club South approval so it could build models with projecting garages. Staff recommended denial in one sentence: the applicant had not shown the change improves the neighborhood. The item was pulled. Combined with the January denials of the CBD Land Investors plan changes, Lake Wales now has a consistent record: the street-facing form standards that earned a PDP approval are not renegotiable after the fact — and applicants are learning to withdraw rather than take the loss.

• A board member proposed a code change from the dais and it was drafted in four weeks. Colburn asked staff on June 23 to look at restoring alternate members to Section 23-205; Ordinance 2026-27, reinstating one alternate on a three-year term, was on the July 23 agenda with a staff report explaining that the alternates provision had been deleted in 2008 as "logistically difficult" and that current staff disagrees. That is a fast loop for a small planning department, and it tells you where the friction is: a seven-member board that met June 23 with five present, and repeatedly runs 3-2 splits, wants a bench.

• The board's own composition turned over in the same meeting that set its agenda. Love and Colburn were re-elected Chair and Vice Chair; Marino and Gibson were recommended to the Mayor; by July 23, Gibson sat in Roy Wilkinson's seat and cast decisive votes on the SR 60 Industrial land use. Wilkinson had been one of the three-vote majorities that denied the CBD Land Investors plans in January. For anyone tracking how this board decides, the June 23 appointment item is the most consequential thing on the agenda, and it drew no public comment.

Raw Notes

• Minutes are a 4-page image-only scan recovered via tools/ocr-pdf.py; the identical text also appears as the draft minutes attachment inside the July 23, 2026 agenda packet, which independently corroborates the OCR.
• Vote grids for a five-member quorum: the shaded cells for Wilkinson and Rio are blank, so five Yes values map in column order to Love, Colburn, McKibben, Blackburn, Bennett.
• Hunt Club South's 2022 conditions of approval (from the City Commission letter of May 17, 2022 in the packet) also include: dark-sky-friendly decorative street lighting maintained by the HOA; a traffic study approved before the Site Development Permit; a development agreement for road improvements; a utilities agreement transferring wells to the City and entering a queue capacity agreement; and right-of-way dedications of 30 feet from centerline on Post Salter Road and 40 feet on 11th Street South.
• RAC Regional Activity Center location criteria (Lake Wales comp plan) limit RACs to one or two locations citywide, 400–1,000 acres, on a major arterial, outside wellhead protection areas, at least 5 miles from another RAC — the Eagle Ridge Mall / US-27 node is that designation, and up to 30% of its gross land area may develop as High Density Residential.
• The BP Business Park district explicitly includes hotels, motels, and car dealerships while excluding retail and drive-up restaurants — which is why the height change had to cover BP as well as C-3 for the Longleaf project.
• Closing announcements: Cochella confirmed the July meeting would be a special meeting on Thursday, July 23 rather than the regular fourth Tuesday, and reported that she and the City Horticulturist had reviewed the landscape code at Rio's request and are drafting changes.