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Meetings · Montverde

Montverde Planning and Zoning Board — December 10, 2025 minutes

Town of Montverde Planning and Zoning Board — December 10, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (4 of 5 members present) Duration: 6:30 PM – 6:53 PM (23 minutes) — the shortest meeting in the coverage window Location: Town Hall, 17404 Sixth Street, Montverde, FL 34756

Attendance

  • Present: Chairwoman Karin Arellano, Holly Broecker, Aaron Wadsworth, Michael Whidden
  • Absent: Josie Weiss; Town Manager Paul Larino absent
  • Staff Present: Anita Geraci-Carver, Town Attorney; Sean Parks, Town Planner; Lisa Busto, Associate Town Planner; Caroline Trepanier, Town Clerk; Iman Rashid, Administrative Assistant

No prior minutes were taken up at this meeting. The November 12, 2025 minutes were carried to March 11, 2026.

There were no discussion items.

Agenda Items

Item 1: Resolution No. 2025-198 — Side-Yard Setback Variance for Retaining Wall Replacement

  • Type: Variance
  • Case Number: Resolution No. 2025-198
  • Location: 16319 Magnolia Bluff Drive, Montverde, Florida
  • Applicant: James P. Monahan and Daney C. Ordonez (property owners); Monahan appeared
  • Request: Variance from Section 10-81 of Chapter 10 of the Montverde Land Development Code, from the side-yard setback, to permit replacement of an existing retaining wall.
  • Current Zoning: [not stated in the minutes — residential, Magnolia Bluff Drive]
  • Proposed Zoning: No change
  • Acreage: [not stated in the minutes]
  • Staff Recommendation: Approve. Busto stated the board's three options: recommend approval, denial with reasons, or continuation pending additional information.
  • Action: Recommended for approval
  • Vote: 4-0 (moved Whidden, seconded Wadsworth)
  • Conditions: As drafted in the resolution ("providing for conditions"); no conditions added by the board
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Busto presented photographs of the wall in the slide deck.
    • Parks stated the wall needed replacement because the damage was due to a hurricane.
    • Monahan briefly explained the wall and the construction in the public hearing. No opposition.

Item 2: Resolution No. 2025-199 — Montverde Academy Parking Improvements Minor Site Plan

  • Type: Site Plan Review (minor site plan)
  • Case Number: Resolution No. 2025-199
  • Location: Academy Lane, Montverde — Montverde Academy campus
  • Applicant: Montverde Academy — Brad Long appearing
  • Request: Minor site plan approval for construction of parking improvements on Academy Lane.
  • Current Zoning: [not stated in the minutes]
  • Proposed Zoning: No change
  • Acreage: [not stated in the minutes]
  • Staff Recommendation: Approve. Busto again laid out the three options.
  • Action: Recommended for approval
  • Vote: 4-0 (moved Wadsworth, seconded Whidden)
  • Conditions: As drafted in the resolution ("providing for conditions"); no conditions added by the board
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Brad Long provided a brief explanation of the process on behalf of the Academy.
    • Parks briefly explained the process and a long-term maintenance agreement. The minutes then record "an elaborate discussion" without attributing positions — the substance of the longest exchange of the night is not on the record.
    • No public hearing speakers recorded on this item.

Public Hearings Summary

  • Number of speakers: 1 — James P. Monahan, the applicant-owner, on Item 1. No non-applicant members of the public spoke on either item.
  • General sentiment: No opposition recorded.
  • Key concerns: None raised by the public.

Key Signals

  • Hurricane damage is now generating variance applications on Magnolia Bluff Drive. Parks put the cause on the record: the retaining wall at 16319 Magnolia Bluff Drive needed replacement because of hurricane damage, and the replacement could not be built within the side-yard setback. Montverde sits on the steep ground above Lake Apopka — the same topography that produced the 2026 slope-ordinance rewrite. Owners of hillside lots with pre-code retaining walls should expect that a like-for-like replacement is a variance, not a permit.

  • Montverde Academy is building parking, and the Town wanted a long-term maintenance agreement. The Academy is the town's dominant institutional landholder and its parking expansion on Academy Lane cleared 4-0 in a 23-minute meeting. The signal is Parks's reference to a long-term maintenance agreement — the Town extracting an ongoing obligation from an institutional applicant rather than a one-time condition. The "elaborate discussion" that followed is unrecorded, which means the terms of that agreement are not in the public minutes.

  • The Town Manager was absent and the board still disposed of both items unanimously in 23 minutes. Larino personally presents or supplements nearly every substantive item in this record; on the one night he was away, the agenda contained only a residential variance and an institutional parking lot. Read against the November 12 meeting — 178 minutes, four Montverde Estates instruments, an HOA attorney's letter — the December agenda is the shape of a Montverde meeting when nothing is at stake.

  • Section 10-81 is the setback provision to know. Two of the three code fights in this window are Chapter 10 setback questions: § 10-13 (minimum lot size for annexed property, denied 4-0 in November) and § 10-81 (side-yard setback, varied here). For anyone evaluating a Montverde parcel, Chapter 10 is where the buildable envelope actually lives, and the board has shown it will grant relief from it for cause on a unanimous voice of the room.

Raw Notes

  • Source provenance: Published minutes PDF is a scan of the signed paper record with no text layer; content recovered by OCR (tools/ocr-pdf.py, 300 DPI, PSM 1). Three pages. Signed Karin Arellano, Chairwoman; attested Caroline Trepanier, Town Clerk.
  • Staffing change visible in the roster: Iman Rashid appears as Administrative Assistant for the first time in this window, with Trepanier now consistently titled Town Clerk.
  • The minutes record "There was an elaborate discussion" on the Montverde Academy item without summarizing it — the only substantive exchange of the meeting is absent from the written record. The video record is at https://southlake.tv/player/44150/44150.
  • Neither item's minutes state acreage, zoning district, or the specific dimensional relief granted. The variance resolution itself (Resolution 2025-198) would carry the setback numbers; it was not separately published on the Planning & Zoning document index.
  • No approval of prior minutes occurred at this meeting. The November 12, 2025, December 10, 2025, and January 14, 2026 minutes were all approved together at the March 11, 2026 meeting — a three-meeting backlog cleared in one sitting.
  • Adjourned 6:53 PM (moved Broecker, seconded Whidden).
  • Companion document: agenda https://mymontverde.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/00-P-Z-Meeting-12-10-2025_Optimized.pdf (44 pp.).
  • Canonical per-meeting record page: https://mymontverde.com/town-meetings/planning-zoning-meeting-wednesday-december-10-2025-at-630-pm-at-town-hall/

Connected records

1 connected record

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