City of Lake Wales Planning and Zoning Board — July 23, 2026 (Special Meeting)

Meeting Overview

Type: Special Meeting (moved off the regular fourth-Tuesday cadence to Thursday, July 23) Quorum: Yes (7 of 7 members present) Duration: Approximately 1 hour 51 minutes (5:30 PM – 7:21 PM)

Composite, and the minutes are unapproved. The minutes PDF posted to the AgendaCenter carries unsigned attest lines; the Board's next opportunity to approve them is its August meeting. Actions and votes are from those minutes; case detail, acreage, and staff recommendations are from the July 23, 2026 agenda packet (77 pages).

Attendance

Present: Chairperson Kyra Love, Vice Chair Bud Colburn, Eric Rio, Casey McKibben, Robin Gibson, Scott Blackburn, Mark Bennett (all seven members)
Absent: None
Staff Present: Autumn Cochella (Growth Management Director, AICP, FRA-RA), Shannon Hancock (Development Coordinator)

Roster change. Robin Gibson, recommended to the Mayor on June 23, 2026, sits for the first time. Roy Wilkinson no longer appears on the roster. Ralph Marino, recommended in the same motion as Gibson, does not appear either.

Agenda Items

Item 3: Approval of Minutes — Regular Board Meeting June 23, 2026

Type: Procedural (minutes approval)
Action: Approved
Vote: All in favor except Gibson, who abstained on the ground that he was not on the Board at the June 23 meeting (Colburn moved, Blackburn seconded)

Item 5: New Business — Board Orientation

Type: Other (training / procedure)
Notable Discussion: Cochella presented on the roles, functions, and duties of Planning & Zoning Board members and walked through the city's project review process. Gibson asked for a copy of the presentation; staff agreed to send it to all members. The orientation opening a special meeting that then decided a 193-acre industrial land use is worth noting on its own.

Item 6: 104 State Road 60 W — SEUP for Expansion of a Pre-Existing Legally Nonconforming Use

Type: SEUP (expansion of a nonconforming use)
Case Number: PID 273002-903500-008105
Location: 104 State Road 60 W — a plaza along Wetmore Street S and Polk Avenue W, adjacent to State Road 60
Applicant: Ikram Merzouk, owner of Sky Vue Smoke Shop and authorized agent for the property owner
Request: Allow retail sales (a 2,800-square-foot smoke shop) as an expansion of a pre-existing legally nonconforming retail use in the PF Professional district, with a waiver reducing required parking.
Current Zoning: PF Professional
Acreage: [not available] — plaza site, 52 parking spaces provided
Staff Recommendation: Approve, finding additional retail will not negatively impact the surrounding area and that a low-traffic-generating smoke shop is a "light commercial business" consistent with Section 23-401
Action: Approved
Vote: 7-0 (Colburn moved, Rio seconded; all seven members Yes)
Conditions: (1) Dumpster screened per Section 23-542 with an inspection passed within 30 days or the SEUP is revoked; (2) ADA parking spaces restriped within 30 days or the SEUP is revoked; (3) approval is for retail sales only — on-premises consumption is prohibited and will result in revocation; (4) if the retail use lapses for more than one year, no new retail may be permitted without a fresh SEUP. Waiver granted: 52 parking spaces where 72 are required.
Notable Discussion: Another enforcement-driven item. Sky Vue Smoke Shop drew a code violation for operating without a business tax receipt in February 2026; the City issued a cease-and-desist letter on June 4, 2026, and the owner complied and closed. Retail is not permitted in PF, but retail has legally operated on the parcel since before 2004; because the whole plaza sits on one parcel ID, adding a retail tenant counts as expanding a nonconformity. The parking waiver rests on time-of-day sharing: the plaza holds two religious establishments that generate demand mainly on Sundays, when the smoke shop is the only other tenant open. Merzouk spoke about why she owns a small business.

Item 7: Iron Mountain — Amendment of Approved Preliminary Subdivision Plat and Residential PDP SEUP

Type: PUD / PDP amendment (recommendation to City Commission)
Case Number: PID 272922866300041010
Location: Approximately 76.95 acres at the northwest corner of Burns Avenue and Buck Moore Road / Mammoth Grove Road — north of Lake Bonnie, west of the Florida Rock Industries sand mine, adjacent to an existing multifamily development and Impact Church
Applicant: David Waronker, owner (John McVay of Elite Design presented)
Request: Amend the Iron Mountain PDP approved by City Commission December 19, 2023.
Current Zoning: R-3 (future land use MDR Medium Density Residential)
Acreage: ~76.95 acres
Staff Recommendation: Approve — the amended plan meets Section 23-443 and includes a mix of housing types
Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission
Vote: 5-2 (Colburn moved, McKibben seconded; Love, Colburn, McKibben, Gibson, Blackburn Yes — Rio and Bennett No)
Conditions: Waivers of strict compliance and conditions of approval as presented
Notable Discussion: The plan the Board approved is materially smaller than the one it denied six months earlier. Approved 2023 plan: 42 front-loaded single-family detached, 250 alley-loaded townhomes, 228 multi-family, and a commercial outparcel — 520 units. Amended plan: 232 front-loaded single-family detached lots, 50 alley-loaded twin villas (duplexes), and a commercial outparcel — 282 units. That is a 46% reduction from the entitlement, and it is 28 units below the 310-unit Plan B this Board rejected on January 27, 2026. Staff notes the site is "high and dry, and vegetated with failing citrus," that street pattern varies from a gridiron, and that access points on Burns and Mammoth are subject to Polk County approval. William Webb of Chamberlain Loop, a retired school bus driver, spoke against — the volume of construction underway in Lake Wales, the stress on streets and utilities, and school bus stop routing on Burns Avenue. The Board questioned Cochella on concurrency.

Item 8: Hunt Club Grove North Phase 3 — PDP Amendment (Landscape Buffer Waiver)

Type: PUD / PDP amendment (waiver only)
Location: Hunt Club North — a 130-acre PDP just west of Hunt Brothers Road, south of State Road 60 and the East Gate Shopping Center (Rural King, Winn-Dixie); the waiver affects the west side of Hamlin Road within Phase 3
Applicant: Strickland Smith, P.E., authorized agent for owner (Lane Register of Lennar attended)
Request: Reduce a portion of the landscape buffer tract to 7 feet where code requires 10 feet.
Acreage: 130-acre PDP (waiver affects 485.6 linear feet of buffer)
Staff Recommendation: Approve — the reduction touches only 485.6 linear feet, and the City Horticulturist finds the reduced area still sufficient to support the landscape requirements
Action: Approved
Vote: 6-1 (McKibben moved, Colburn seconded; Bennett the sole No)
Notable Discussion: The applicant's justification is pure geometry: across the western portion of Phase 3 there is not enough east-west room for a 10-foot landscape tract, 100-foot lots, and a 50-foot road right-of-way at once. The tract narrows from 11.6 feet at the north end to 7.0 feet at the south, averaging 9.3 feet — a 7% reduction (483 square feet of 6,506). As compensation the applicant proposes canopy trees on 40-foot centers instead of 50, adding four trees to the 740-foot buffer. The PDP was approved by City Commission in 2022 and is building out in phases. Distinguish this from Hunt Club South (~104 acres, west of Hunt Brothers Road and south of Post Salter Road), whose recessed-garage waiver was pulled from the June 23 agenda.

Item 9: SR 60 Industrial — Large-Scale FLUM Amendment (Ord 2026-25) and Zoning Map Amendment (Ord 2026-26)

Type: Comp Plan Amendment (large-scale Future Land Use Map) + Rezoning
Case Number: Ordinance 2026-25 (FLUM) / Ordinance 2026-26 (Zoning); parcels including 27-30-06-913000-002010 and 27-30-05-000000-041020, plus the platted blocks of WEST LAKE WALES (Plat Book 7, Page 37)
Location: Approximately 193.52 acres on the western edge of town, south of State Road 60 and east of West Lake Wales Road — west of the Stoneridge MDP and Industrial and of the Lake Wales Municipal Airport, with the Florida Midland Railroad along the southeast portion of the site
Applicant: Shelton Rice of Peterson & Myers, authorized agent
Request: Assign City future land use IND Industrial and City zoning I-1 Industrial to land carrying the Polk County designation A/RR Agriculture/Residential Rural, contingent on City Commission adopting the annexation ordinance and Ordinance 2026-28.
Current Zoning: Polk County A/RR Agriculture/Residential Rural
Proposed Zoning: I-1 Industrial (future land use IND)
Acreage: 193.52 ± acres
Staff Recommendation: Approve both, contingent on the annexation ordinance and on Ordinance 2026-28 Parcel Specific Land Use Conditions
Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission — two separate roll calls
Vote: FLUM 5-2 (Colburn moved, Gibson seconded; Love, Colburn, Rio, Gibson, Blackburn Yes — McKibben and Bennett No). Zoning 6-1 (Colburn moved, Gibson seconded; McKibben the sole No — Bennett flipped to Yes).
Conditions: Contingent on adoption of the annexation ordinance and of Ordinance 2026-28 applying Parcel Specific Land Use Conditions to the site.
Notable Discussion: No development plans accompany the request — which is why the City wrote a new regulatory instrument to attach conditions to raw entitlement (Item 10). The applicant's own impact analysis projects 1,004,400 square feet of industrial building at roughly 12% floor-area ratio (the I-1 maximum is 50%, which would allow 4.2 million square feet). Utility capacity is claimed from existing dry lines: a 6-inch force main and a 12-inch water main on the north side of SR 60, both currently carrying no demand. The applicant's employee-based wastewater estimate is 15,066 gallons per day for a million-square-foot building; Polk County's per-square-foot method yields 241,056 gpd at the proposed FAR. Staff cite Lake Wales Envisioned Action Step 1 — "identify new sites for industry" — and position the site by its access to SR 60, rail, the municipal airport, and proximity to Winter Haven's Intermodal Logistics Center a few miles west. Bennett raised environmental wetlands within the project area and traffic. Gibson called the site "a gem" — a unique collection of highway, rail, and air — argued it should be held to quality and jobs, and voiced concern about the developer selling out. Colburn echoed him and noted that Winter Haven "does not have these types of plans for industry."

Item 10: Ordinance 2026-28 — New Section 23-406, Parcel Specific Land Use Conditions

Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Regulations) with site-specific application
Case Number: Ordinance 2026-28
Location: Citywide mechanism; applied on adoption to the SR 60 Industrial parcels (27-30-06-913000-002010; 27-30-05-000000-041020)
Applicant: City Planning Staff
Request: Create Section 23-406 Parcel Specific Land Use Conditions (PSLUC) — a tool letting the City attach binding, parcel-specific development standards as an outcome of a FLUM and zoning map amendment, identified on the Zoning Map, controlling wherever they conflict with the general Land Development Regulations.
Staff Recommendation: Approve
Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission, with an added directive
Vote: 7-0 (Bennett moved, Colburn seconded; all seven members Yes)
Conditions: The Board's motion added a recommendation that staff and the applicant work toward enhanced stormwater management because the project lies within the Peace Creek drainage basin, a stressed basin. The PSLUC conditions as drafted: a 200-foot industrial building setback from the adjacent residential parcels on the east side of West Lake Wales Road; a 20-foot buffer along the southwestern boundary with four canopy and five understory trees per 100 linear feet plus a 6-foot fence, wall, or shrub; and a 20-foot buffer along SR 60 to the same planting standard, except where buffering would fall in floodplain or wetland.
Notable Discussion: Bennett commended staff for devising the tool. Shelton Rice said the client was open to board recommendations. Gibson argued that engineers routinely mitigate environmental issues and that values rise as a result, restating that the site is "a gem." The specific protection driving the conditions is the existing residential in unincorporated Polk County to the west, along the CSX Railroad and accessed by West Lake Wales Alturas Road.

Item 11: Ordinance 2026-24 — Repeal Section 23-781, Annual Adjustment of Impact Fees

Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Regulations)
Case Number: Ordinance 2026-24
Location: Citywide
Applicant: City Planning Staff, on the City Attorney's advice
Request: Repeal Section 23-781, which automatically raised every city impact fee each October 1 by the change in the construction cost index.
Staff Recommendation: Approve
Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission
Vote: 7-0 (Colburn moved, McKibben seconded; all seven members Yes)
Notable Discussion: The staff report quotes the City Attorney directly: the current version of §163.31801(6)(e), Florida Statutes, provides that impact fees may not be increased more than once every four years, so Section 23-781 "must be repealed at or before adoption of the current impact fee study being performed by Raftelis." That study is scheduled for adoption later in 2026 and "may result in an increase in certain fees." The repealed section had also served as the city's 90-day notice mechanism for new fees.

Item 12: Ordinance 2026-27 — Amend Section 23-205, Planning Board

Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Regulations)
Case Number: Ordinance 2026-27
Location: Citywide (board composition)
Applicant: City Planning Staff, at Vice Chair Colburn's June 23 request
Request: Reinstate one alternate member on the Planning and Zoning Board, appointed to a three-year term, serving only when a regular member is absent or disqualified, and able to move into a regular seat if a member resigns early.
Staff Recommendation: Approve
Action: Recommended for approval to City Commission with a modification
Vote: 7-0 (Colburn moved, Rio seconded; all seven members Yes)
Conditions: The motion carried a modification to paragraph 23-205.3(c) — the provision Chair Love flagged, which allows a special meeting to be called by the chairman or vice-chairman on 12 hours of notice.
Notable Discussion: The staff report is unusually candid about reversing a predecessor: alternates were eliminated in 2008 after the then-Planning Director wrote that "the use of alternates is logistically difficult, and there has been no real need to call the alternates into play except for strict compliance with the ordinance." Current staff "does not observe the same logistical difficulties" and finds alternates valuable.

Public Hearings Summary

Number of speakers: 4 across seven public hearings — Ikram Merzouk (applicant, Item 6), John McVay (applicant's engineer, Item 7), William Webb of Chamberlain Loop (Item 7, opposed), Shelton Rice (applicant's attorney, Items 9 and 10)
General sentiment: Near-silent. The only member of the public not affiliated with an applicant spoke against Iron Mountain. A 193-acre industrial land use change and a new land-use regulatory instrument drew no public testimony at all.
Key concerns:
- Volume of construction under way and the load on streets and utilities (Webb)
- School bus stop routing on Burns Avenue (Webb)
- Wetlands within the SR 60 Industrial site and corridor traffic (Bennett, from the dais)
- Stormwater in the Peace Creek basin (Bennett, from the dais)

Key Signals

Lake Wales just entitled 193 acres and a million square feet of industrial building on SR 60 — with no development plan and no public objection. The site sits between the Lake Wales Municipal Airport, the Florida Midland Railroad, and State Road 60, a few miles east of Winter Haven's Intermodal Logistics Center. Highway, rail, and air on one parcel. The applicant's own filing projects 1,004,400 square feet at 12% floor-area ratio, against an I-1 ceiling that would permit 4.2 million. This is the largest single land-use conversion in the Lake Wales record and it reframes the city: the corpus has read Lake Wales as a heritage town processing SEUPs for taco trucks and car lots, and as the likely counterevidence city for the Quiet Revolution thesis. That reading is now wrong. Lake Wales is bidding for Polk County's logistics economy on the SR-60 cross-state corridor, not the US-27 residential one.
The City invented a new regulatory instrument to make the industrial entitlement safe — and it is exportable. Ordinance 2026-28 creates Section 23-406 Parcel Specific Land Use Conditions: binding, parcel-level development standards attached at the moment of the map amendment, mapped on the Zoning Map, and controlling over the general LDRs wherever they conflict. It exists because there is no site plan to condition. Applied here it buys a 200-foot setback from the county residential to the west and two 20-foot planted buffers. This is a structural answer to a problem every corridor city has — how to entitle raw land without surrendering leverage — and it is more durable than a development agreement, because it lives in the code and on the map rather than in a contract. Watch whether Haines City, Davenport, or Polk County adopt a comparable device.
The corridor's residential entitlements are shrinking, not growing. Iron Mountain came back approved at 282 units against a 520-unit entitlement — a 46% reduction — and 28 units below the plan this same board denied in January. The composition shifted too: 250 alley-loaded townhomes and 228 multi-family units gone, replaced by 232 front-loaded single-family detached lots and 50 twin villas. Six months of negotiation between a developer who could not find a builder for alley-loaded product and a board that would not release the housing-mix requirement produced a smaller, lower-density, entirely for-sale project. For anyone modeling southern Polk absorption, the approved-unit count is now a poor proxy for what will be built, and the direction of revision is down.
A board that appointed a member in June had that member cast the deciding tenor of a 193-acre vote in July. Robin Gibson sat for the first time, received his orientation in Item 5, and by Item 9 was the loudest voice for the industrial project — seconding both motions, calling the site "a gem," and framing it as jobs. Roy Wilkinson, part of the majority that denied both CBD Land Investors plans in January, is off the roster. On the same night the Board recommended restoring an alternate seat (Ord 2026-27) and modified the 12-hour special-meeting notice provision that had governed this very meeting. The membership, the quorum rules, and the notice rules all moved in one sitting.
Impact fees are being reset, not raised. The Board recommended repealing the automatic annual CPI escalator on all impact fees because §163.31801(6)(e), Florida Statutes, permits an increase only once every four years — the City had been out of compliance. A Raftelis impact-fee study lands later in 2026 and "may result in an increase in certain fees." Two months earlier this same board recommended a brand-new library impact fee. The sequence is a city cleaning up its fee statute immediately before a full recalibration: expect a single step change in Lake Wales development costs rather than the annual drift builders had priced in.

Raw Notes

July 23 minutes are text-extractable (typed, not scanned) with blank attest lines — the unapproved draft posted to the AgendaCenter's Minutes category. The June 23, 2026 draft minutes attached to this packet are byte-identical in substance to the signed June scan, which cross-validates the OCR on that document.
Vote grids for a full seven-member roll call put Rio's value on the second line of the table and the other six on the third; per-member attributions above follow column order and are corroborated by the stated tallies ("5 – yay and 2 - nay", "6 – yay and 1 - nay") and by who moved and seconded.
Bennett split his two SR 60 Industrial votes: No on the FLUM amendment, Yes on the zoning map amendment. McKibben voted No on both. Their dissents are the only opposition recorded on the industrial item.
The packet lists the SR 60 Industrial staff report and both ordinances twice under Item 9 — a duplicate-attachment clerical artifact, not two separate items.
Ordinance 2026-24's title reads "to Appeal Section 23-781" on the agenda; the ordinance text and staff report both read repeal.
SR 60 Industrial infrastructure claims to verify later: the 6-inch force main and 12-inch water main along the north side of SR 60 are described as existing but dry, with no current demand. Sewer capacity for a million-square-foot industrial building rests on that assertion.
IND future land use policy I.1.2.9 caps commercial uses serving employees at 15% of an IND-designated area and sets a maximum FAR of 0.75; Table 23-422B sets the I-1 building coverage maximum at 50% and impervious surface ratio at 75%.
Comparative buffer standards attached to the site: Polk County Type A (6 feet) along the west boundary at West Lake Wales Road South; Polk County Type C (20 feet) along the south boundary adjacent to residential lots; Lake Wales Type C Scenic Highway (20 feet) along SR 60.
Sky Vue Smoke Shop parking calculation: retail 36 spaces required (7,200 sq ft at 1 per 200), non-medical office 6, two religious establishments 30 (0.3 per seat at 100 seats) — 72 required, 52 provided, with actual weekday demand estimated at 42 and Sunday demand at 44.
Closing announcement: Cochella advised that a project may soon require a planning review meeting, and that members unable to attend may meet with staff separately to go over it.

Lake Wales Planning and Zoning Board — July 23, 2026 record