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Meetings · Montverde

Montverde Planning and Zoning Board — September 23, 2025 agenda

Town of Montverde Planning and Zoning Board — September 23, 2025 (Meeting Cancelled)

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting — noticed, packeted, and then cancelled. The meeting was never convened. Quorum: N/A — no meeting held Duration: N/A Location: Town Hall, 17404 Sixth Street, Montverde, FL 34756 (as noticed)

Attendance

  • Present: None — no meeting held
  • Absent: N/A
  • Staff Present: N/A

Rostered on the notice: Board Members Karin Arellano, Josie Weiss, Holly Broecker, Aaron Wadsworth, Michael Whidden. Staff: Paul Larino, Town Manager; Anita Geraci-Carver, Town Attorney; Sean Parks, Town Planner; Lisa Busto, Associate Town Planner; Caroline Trepanier, Administrative Assistant.

Evidence of cancellation

Four independent indicators, all from the Town's own record:

  1. The agenda PDF is published under the filename 00-Agenda-P-Z-09.23.2025-CANCELLED.pdf, and the Town's Planning & Zoning document index labels the entry "Planning & Zoning Meeting Agenda – Tuesday, September 23, 2025 – Cancelled." The Town uses this suffix convention explicitly and uses it nowhere else in the 2025–2026 window.
  2. No per-meeting notice page exists at mymontverde.com/town-meetings/ for September 23, 2025, while every held meeting in the window (April 2 2025, July 29 2025, November 12 2025, December 10 2025, January 14 2026, March 11 2026, June 10 2026) has one.
  3. No minutes exist for September 23, 2025 anywhere in the Town's document archive.
  4. The next held meeting picked up the prior meeting's minutes. On November 12, 2025 the board approved the July 29, 2025 minutes — not September minutes. Its business was the same three items noticed for September 23.

This is a cadence finding, not a retrieval gap: the board did not sit between July 29 and November 12, 2025 — a 106-day gap in a period when a 114-lot subdivision was moving through entitlement.

Agenda Items

The following were noticed for September 23, 2025 and not heard. All three were re-noticed and heard at the November 12, 2025 meeting.

Item 1: Approval of Minutes — July 29, 2025

  • Type: Other (procedural)
  • Case Number: N/A
  • Location: N/A
  • Applicant: Town of Montverde
  • Request: Approve the minutes of the July 29, 2025 Planning & Zoning meeting.
  • Action: Not heard — meeting cancelled. Carried to November 12, 2025, where the minutes were approved as amended 3-0.

Item 2: Discussion Item — Oath of Office, Michael Whidden

  • Type: Other (board appointment)
  • Case Number: N/A
  • Location: N/A
  • Applicant: Town of Montverde
  • Request: Administer the oath of office to Michael Whidden as Planning & Zoning Board Member, filling the seat vacated by Thomas Johnson.
  • Action: Not heard — meeting cancelled. Whidden was sworn in at the November 12, 2025 meeting. The seat sat vacant for a further 50 days.

Item 3: Ordinance No. 2025-59 — Minimum Lot Size for Annexed Property (LDC § 10-13)

  • Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Code)
  • Case Number: Ordinance No. 2025-59
  • Location: Townwide — applies to property annexed into the Town
  • Applicant: Town of Montverde
  • Request: Amend Section 10-13 in Chapter 10 of the Land Development Code relating to minimum lot size for property annexed into the Town.
  • Current Zoning: N/A (townwide)
  • Proposed Zoning: N/A
  • Acreage: N/A
  • Staff Recommendation: [not stated on the agenda]
  • Action: Not heard — meeting cancelled. Heard November 12, 2025, where the board voted to recommend denial 4-0 and asked staff to return with a half-acre minimum instead.

Item 4: Ordinance No. 2025-60 — Comprehensive Plan / FLUM Amendment, 9.47 Acres

  • Type: Comprehensive Plan Amendment (Future Land Use Map)
  • Case Number: Ordinance No. 2025-60
  • Location: 9.47 +/- acres; the parcels annexed April 2, 2025 near CR 455
  • Applicant: Town of Montverde on application (Wilmington Development Services / DCS Real Estate Investments holdings)
  • Request: Amend the Comprehensive Land-Use Plan designation, pursuant to § 163.3187 Fla. Stat., from Lake County Rural Transition and Bella Collina to Town of Montverde Single Family Low Density Residential on the Future Land Use Map.
  • Current Zoning: Future land use: Lake County Rural Transition and Bella Collina
  • Proposed Zoning: Future land use: Town of Montverde Single Family Low Density Residential
  • Acreage: 9.47 +/- acres
  • Staff Recommendation: [not stated on the agenda]
  • Action: Not heard — meeting cancelled. Heard November 12, 2025, recommended for approval 4-0.

Item 5: Ordinance No. 2025-61 — Rezoning to Single-Family Residential PUD

  • Type: Rezoning (PUD)
  • Case Number: Ordinance No. 2025-61
  • Location: South of Ridgewood Avenue, west of County Road 455, east of Blackstill Lake Road, Montverde
  • Applicant: DCS Real Estate Investments, LLC and Wilmington Development Services Inc. (named owners in the ordinance title)
  • Request: Change zoning from Lake County PUD, Agriculture and Light Industrial, and Town of Montverde Single Family Low Density, to Town of Montverde Single-Family Residential PUD; approve waivers; approve variances from Town Code with conditions.
  • Current Zoning: Lake County PUD / Agriculture / Light Industrial; Town of Montverde Single Family Low Density
  • Proposed Zoning: Town of Montverde Single-Family Residential PUD
  • Acreage: [not stated on the agenda — the assemblage totals ~68 acres per the applicant]
  • Staff Recommendation: [not stated on the agenda]
  • Action: Not heard — meeting cancelled. Heard November 12, 2025, recommended for approval 4-0 with a water-conservation modification.

Public Hearings Summary

No public hearings were held. Items 3, 4 and 5 were noticed as public hearings and their hearings occurred instead on November 12, 2025, where residents of the Magnolia Terrace and Magnolia Bluff subdivisions appeared in volume and the Magnolia Terrace HOA submitted a letter through counsel.

Key Signals

  • The meeting a 68-acre rezoning was scheduled for did not happen, and the board's own seat stayed empty because of it. Michael Whidden's oath of office was Item II.A on this agenda. When the meeting was cancelled, the fifth seat went unfilled for another 50 days, and Whidden — who had been speaking from the podium as a resident at the April and July meetings — remained a member of the public through the interval. A four-member board is one absence from losing quorum; Montverde ran that risk for three months.

  • Ordinance 2025-59 is the load-bearing item, and the cancellation delayed it into a hearing where it died. The minimum-lot-size amendment for annexed property had to pass for the Comprehensive Plan and PUD ordinances to take effect — staff said so explicitly on November 12. Noticing it in September and hearing it in November gave residents an additional seven weeks of notice on a development they had not yet organized against. By the time it was heard, the Magnolia Terrace HOA had retained counsel and the board recommended denial 4-0.

  • This is what "meets as needed" costs. Montverde's Planning & Zoning Board has no fixed monthly calendar. Between July 29 and November 12, 2025 — 106 days — the board did not sit, while a 114-lot subdivision and a Land Development Code amendment governing every future annexation waited. Anyone tracking this town cannot use a meeting calendar as a monitoring instrument. The reliable trigger is the appearance of an agenda packet PDF under mymontverde.com/wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/, which precedes the meeting by days.

  • A full agenda packet was produced for a meeting that never occurred. The Town published Agenda-Packet-P-Z-Meeting-09-23-2025.pdf — 76 pages of staff analysis on the three ordinances. For a researcher, that packet is a dated snapshot of the Town's position on the Bella Collina Montverde Estates applications seven weeks before the position was tested in public. The September and November packets are the same case at two different pressures.

Raw Notes

  • Source provenance: The agenda PDF is a scan with no text layer; content recovered by OCR (tools/ocr-pdf.py, 300 DPI, PSM 1). The word "Cancelled" appears in the Town's document-index label and the filename, not in the body of the agenda document itself — the PDF is the agenda as originally noticed.
  • Companion document: a 76-page agenda packet for this cancelled meeting is published at https://mymontverde.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Agenda-Packet-P-Z-Meeting-09-23-2025.pdf (fully scanned; not text-extractable).
  • The agenda lists Michael Whidden on the Board Members roster despite his oath being Item II.A — i.e. the roster anticipates the appointment.
  • The reason for cancellation is not stated in any published Town document reviewed in this harvest. The record supports that the meeting was cancelled; it does not support any particular cause. No conclusion should be drawn about quorum, notice defect, or applicant request without further evidence.
  • The meeting notice link and video feed for Montverde meetings is https://southlake.tv/player/44150/44150 (South Lake TV).

Connected records

1 connected record

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