City of Maitland Planning and Zoning Commission — June 5, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (4 of 5 members present) Duration: 1 hour 19 minutes (6:00 PM – 7:19 PM)

Attendance

• Present: Chair Glen Jaffee, Vice-Chair Kathleen McIver, Commissioner Greg Hardwick, Commissioner Jody Barry
• Absent: Commissioner Eddie Baird
• Staff Present: Sara Blanchard (Chief Planner), Barrett Chaix (Senior Planner), Jamie Bennett (Planner III), Drew Smith (City Attorney)

Agenda Items

Item 1: Conditional Use Permit CUP(2025)-0001 — Orangewood Presbyterian Church, 1300 W Maitland Boulevard

• Type: CUP (Conditional Use Permit)
• Case Number: CUP(2025)-0001
• Location: 1300 W Maitland Boulevard, Maitland, FL
• Applicant: Klima Weeks Civil Engineering and Orangewood Presbyterian Church, Inc. Presenting for the applicant: David Moore, Generations Initiative Director.
• Request: Conditional use approval for additions to and expansion of the existing church and school facilities — student capacity from 600 to 800 students, and building area from 103,753 SF to 167,671 SF. No changes proposed to site access or to existing landscape buffers, walls, and fences.
• Current Zoning: RSF-1 (Residential Single Family 1)
• Proposed Zoning: RSF-1 (unchanged — conditional use, not a rezoning)
• Acreage: [not stated in minutes]
• Staff Recommendation: Approve with conditions. The Development Review Committee voted May 7, 2025 to recommend approval with conditions per the staff report.
• Action: Approved
• Vote: 4-0 (Ayes: McIver, Jaffee, Hardwick, Barry; Nays: none. Mover: Barry; Seconder: McIver)
• Conditions:
  1. Stacking shall be designed to accommodate 40% of student population, or the applicant shall provide a study evaluating the safety of the proposed stacking arrangement.
  2. All proposed structures and improvements are subject to site plan review and shall be limited to those displayed on "Orangewood Church Master Plan, Sheet C-100."
  3. Uses, hours of operation, and size of structures shall comply with those shown on Sheet C-100.
  4. All conditions established in prior Conditional Use approvals, agreements, and covenants for the property — lighting, noise, signage, landscaping, screening, buffering, movable gate, ingress, egress, access, number of services, student registration, use of athletic facilities and concessions — remain in effect.
• Notable Discussion: The applicant confirmed current enrollment is 530 students against the approved 600, expanding to 800, and that a traffic study had been completed. A neighborhood meeting was held March 6, 2025. Commissioners discussed existing parking conditions and the paved intersection. The board discussed synthetic turf athletic fields. Chair Jaffee asked whether the gate to Maitland Woods could be opened earlier to match the new operating hours and whether that would relieve parking pressure in Maitland Woods; City Attorney Drew Smith clarified that was outside the scope of the night's decision. Jaffee flagged that vehicle stacking could adversely affect the office complex to the east. No members of the public spoke. Staff noted on the record that a CUP does not proceed to City Council — it concludes with the decision of the Planning and Zoning Commission.

Item 2: LDC Text Amendment — Section 5.2.4 General Parking and Loading Area Standards, Special Parking Restrictions

• Type: Text Amendment
• Case Number: [none assigned in minutes]
• Location: Citywide (residential zone districts)
• Applicant: City of Maitland (staff-initiated, in consultation with the City Attorney)
• Request: Clarify and reinstate standards governing the parking of major recreational equipment — boats, houseboats, trailers, pickup campers, motor homes, tent trailers, and transport cases — in residential areas. Staff reported that the 2022 Land Development Code rewrite reworded and omitted sections in a way that "effectively changed the meaning of the code," with the result that under the current text any recreational vehicle can be parked in any area of a front yard without regard to setback or surface requirements. The amendment restores the pre-2022 standard (boats over 200 pounds may be parked in residential areas on a trailer on a paved or hard-packed driveway at least fifteen feet from the edge of the street pavement) and codifies what "paved or hard-packed" means: asphalt, concrete, brick paver, or packed gravel are included; loose gravel, mulch, recycled rubber, and grass are explicitly excluded.
• Current Zoning: N/A (citywide text)
• Proposed Zoning: N/A
• Staff Recommendation: Recommend approval to City Council
• Action: Approved (recommendation of approval forwarded to City Council)
• Vote: 4-0 (Ayes: Hardwick, McIver, Jaffee, Barry; Nays: none. Mover: Hardwick; Seconder: McIver)
• Conditions: Amendments made from the dais and incorporated into the recommendation:
  • In subsection 5.2.4(4)(A)4.d.i, strike "brick" and insert "stabilizing" (raised by Commissioner Hardwick regarding geo-grids under grass).
  • Width standard restated as "equal to or less than one hundred two (102) inches in width," replacing "under 8 and a half feet," so that an exactly 8.5-foot-wide RV is unambiguously allowed (raised by Chair Jaffee).
• Notable Discussion: Senior Planner Chaix presented the item and framed it as reinstating standards used in the city for the last twenty years. Staff attributed the need for the amendment to concerns raised through the code enforcement process about what constitutes a "paved or hard-packed driveway." The public period was opened and closed with no member of the public present. The motion as recorded references "the three amendments made during discussion"; the minutes narrate two.

Item 3: 2050 City of Maitland Comprehensive Development Plan — Evaluation and Appraisal Report-based Amendments

• Type: Comprehensive Plan Amendment (EAR-based)

• Case Number: [none assigned in minutes]

• Location: Citywide

• Applicant: City of Maitland, with consultants Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc.

• Request: Adopt EAR-based amendments to the Comprehensive Development Plan, required by Section 163.3191, Florida Statutes, at least once every seven years. Kimley-Horn identified 74 changes to Florida Statute Chapter 163 evaluated for relevance to Maitland. Amendments must be transmitted to FloridaCommerce, Bureau of Community Planning, by September 1, 2025.

• Current Zoning: N/A (comprehensive plan text)

• Proposed Zoning: N/A

• Staff Recommendation: Forward a recommendation of approval to City Council

• Action: Approved (recommendation of approval forwarded to City Council)

• Vote: 4-0 (Ayes: McIver, Hardwick, Barry, Jaffee; Nays: none. Mover: McIver; Seconder: Hardwick)

• Conditions: None

• Notable Discussion: Technical amendments presented included: a policy committing to Community Redevelopment Master Plan standards (Future Land Use); Metropolitan Planning Area classification updates (Mobility); replacing "Levels of Service" with "levels of traffic stress threshold" per FDOT terminology (Mobility); a policy not prohibiting demolition of qualifying structures for any reason other than public safety, per the Resiliency and Safe Structures Act (Housing); annual financial reporting of impact fee charges (Governance and Implementation); and reserving proportionate-share school mitigation funds until a specific capacity improvement appears in the school board educational facilities plan (Public Schools).

  The substantive change came from a City Council instruction dated April 22, 2024: eliminate both the Density Incentive for Community Enhancement (DICE) program and the allocation of maximum density and intensity by parcel size in the Main Street Future Land Use designation. Staff laid out the arithmetic on the record: for roughly 25 years, the only path to 40 units per acre or 2.0 FAR by right — and 67 units per acre or 2.40 FAR using DICE — was to assemble over three contiguous acres. A half-acre lot was capped at 19.8 units per acre or 0.3 FAR by right, and 30 units per acre or 0.45 FAR with DICE, "less than half of the residential density of a 3 acre site." Staff reported that since DICE was introduced in 2019 with CDP 2035, no applicant has ever used it, describing the process — a Council workshop at which Council cannot commit to either the density or the public project, followed by an economic analysis proving rough proportionality — as "lengthy and expensive" and lacking certainty. Staff also reported that as Maitland nears build-out, sites where three contiguous acres can be assembled "have declined dramatically."

  Commissioners asked whether anyone had used the DICE program, discussed how many sites are finished with redevelopment and will not add acreage, asked whether the levels-of-traffic-stress analysis had been performed and whether it would appear in the Data, Inventory and Analysis transmitted to the state, and asked about e-bikes on bike-pedestrian trails. The public hearing was opened with no speakers.

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 0 across all three noticed public hearings
• General sentiment: N/A — no public present
• Key concerns: None raised by the public. The substantive scrutiny came from the dais.

Key Signals

• Maitland deleted a density incentive nobody ever used, and in the same motion tripled what a small downtown lot can build. The EAR amendments eliminate both DICE and the parcel-size-based density ladder in the Main Street land use. The ladder is the consequential half: a half-acre downtown parcel had been capped at 19.8 units per acre while a three-acre assemblage got 40, and removing the ladder lifts small lots to the district maximum. Staff's stated reason is that assemblage sites "have declined dramatically" as the city nears build-out. This is the structural precondition for everything Maitland does on housing over the following year — the small-lot missing-middle exemption debated in April and May 2026 and drafted as Ordinance 1461 for the August 6, 2026 hearing is only buildable because this ceiling moved first.

• A six-year, zero-uptake incentive program is the corpus's clearest evidence that negotiated density does not work. DICE launched in 2019 and drew no applicants because, as staff described it, Council "cannot commit to either the density or the public project" before the developer completes an expensive proportionality analysis. Maitland's response was not to fix the negotiation but to remove it and raise the by-right ceiling. Compare the paid-upzoning and community-benefit mechanisms elsewhere in the corpus: Maitland is the case where a city ran the experiment for six years and published the null result.

• The largest building program approved was institutional, not residential — a 61% expansion inside a single-family district. Orangewood Presbyterian's church and school go from 103,753 SF to 167,671 SF and from 600 to 800 students, on RSF-1 land, approved 4-0. In a city with no greenfield inventory, institutional intensification is a growth vector that never appears in a housing-unit count. The only condition with teeth is the stacking requirement — design for 40% of student population or produce a safety study — which is a traffic condition standing in for a capacity condition.

• A conditional use permit in Maitland ends at the appointed board. Staff stated on the record that a CUP "does not proceed to the City Council; but concludes with a decision of the Planning and Zoning Commission." A five-member appointed board holds final land use authority over conditional uses, with no elected body in the path. That elevates the stakes on board composition — relevant given the turnover that follows: McIver terms out in December 2025 and Linehan is seated in February 2026.

• A comprehensive code rewrite silently repealed twenty years of standards, and code enforcement found the hole. Staff reported that the 2022 LDC rewrite reworded and omitted subsections such that any recreational vehicle could be parked anywhere in a front yard with no setback or surface requirement. The repair took a public hearing and two floor amendments. The pattern — a modernization rewrite producing unintended permissiveness discovered downstream through enforcement — is worth watching in every corpus city that has recently adopted a rewritten code, including Groveland's CDC work and Clermont's DPZ CoDesign plan.

Raw Notes

• Minutes of April 3, 2025 approved 4-0 (Mover: McIver; Seconder: Hardwick; Ayes: Barry, Jaffee, McIver, Hardwick).
• No Old Business. Under New Business, staff provided a status update on current development projects (not itemized in the minutes).
• Both the agenda (fileId 4161) and the approved minutes (fileId 4256) were retrieved for this meeting; the agenda adds no items beyond those recorded in the minutes.
• The minutes PDF carries interleaved page references to the agenda packet ("Page 6 of 155," "Page 20 of 155," "Page 25 of 155"), an artifact of the clerk pasting staff-report text into the minutes body.
• CUP review standards recited in the minutes (LDC Sec. 2.5.1(g)(3)): consistency with the comprehensive development plan; appropriateness for location and compatibility with surrounding character; no significant adverse odor, noise, glare, or vibration impacts; and maintenance of safe ingress, egress, and traffic flow.
• Text amendment review standards recited (eight factors, LDC): consistency with the CDP; conflict with the LDC and City Code; whether required by changed conditions; demonstrated community need; consistency with zone district purpose and use compatibility; logical and orderly development pattern; adverse environmental impacts; and impact on public facility availability.
• Downstream trail for the EAR amendments: transmitted to FloridaCommerce by September 1, 2025 → CDP 2050 adopted by City Council November 10, 2025 (Ordinance #1144, per recitals in the August 2026 packet) → LDC cleanup deleting the unused DICE provisions and the DM-PD district recommended 4-0 at the March 5, 2026 PZC meeting.
• Source: CivicClerk tenant maitlandfl, agendaId 566 (event 799).