City of Mount Dora Planning and Zoning Commission — January 15, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (4 of 7 members present) Duration: 10:00 AM – 11:48 AM (1 hour 48 minutes) Location: City Hall Board Room, 510 North Baker Street

Attendance

• Present: Chairman Miles Beach, Adrian Coombes, Tom Dring, Andrea Lother
• Absent: Harris Turner, Suzanne Scheck, Barbara Tietmeyer
• Staff Present: Michele Janiszewski, Senior Planner; Ryan Winkler, Senior Planner; Whitney Scott, Administrative Coordinator; Andrew Hand, City Attorney

Presenters: Todd Davis, Protean Design Group; Sam Medina, Sloan Engineering Group; Jesse White, owner of Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers; Joseph B. Bricklemyer, attorney.

Prior minutes: December 18, 2024 minutes approved 4-0 (moved Coombes, seconded Dring).

Annual officer elections were deferred to the February meeting because not all members were present.

Agenda Items

Item 1: Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers — Site Plan (SP23-08)

• Type: Site Plan
• Case Number: SP23-08
• Location: Eudora Road
• Applicant: Eudora Road, LLC (owner and applicant); Germana Engineering & Associates, Inc. (engineer); Green Consulting Group, Inc. (landscape architect); GMLV Architecture, Inc. (architect)
• Request: Site plan approval for a Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers restaurant, returning to the board after being tabled at a prior meeting over traffic and access concerns.
• Current Zoning: [not available]
• Proposed Zoning: N/A
• Acreage: [not available]
• Staff Recommendation: Approve, subject to DRC and engineering comments
• Action: Approved
• Vote: [tally not recorded in the minutes — moved Coombes, seconded Lother; minutes state "the board voted to approve"]
• Conditions: Approval carried "a preamble that staff/attorney attempt to contact the owner (Ross)" of the adjacent property to address the traffic and bottlenecking concerns.
• Notable Discussion:
  • Todd Davis presented a tier two traffic impact study. He stated Eudora Road does not meet access management guidelines for a signal, and that Freddy's generates seventy-five p.m. peak-hour trips. The congestion the board was worried about, he argued, is pre-existing.
  • Beach stated there was a recent roll-over accident in front of the proposed site. The board reiterated congestion, bottlenecking, and safety concerns.
  • Davis said Lake County's access management standards were last updated around 2022 and are consistent with FDOT; the Lake County report does not include traffic accidents, which is "not required or identified within the City guidelines."
  • The core problem was a western connection the applicant does not control. A rear/west connection behind the proposed dumpster sits on the neighboring parcel. Davis said an existing curb cut, landscaping, and angled parking are there, but any change requires coordination and acceptance from the neighboring owner — whom neither current nor previous legal counsel had been able to reach. Medina confirmed "almost zero communication with the neighboring property owner."
  • Alternatives canvassed: roundabout (right-of-way impacts), directional median (shopping-plaza and legal-process impacts), three-way stop. Davis recommended a three-way stop outside Freddy's but noted it sits outside the applicant's purview because they don't own the property. Davis added they are not opposed to a three-way stop or a right-turn-only sign if the adjacent owner agrees.
  • Attorney Bricklemyer framed the legal constraint: neither Freddy's nor the City can force the adjacent owner to allow a west exit; it is not entitled in the original development plan; the site plan is compliant. He later added the applicant "has met the requirements and can't be held accountable for design failures."
  • City Attorney Hand confirmed the City can voluntarily reach out but cannot require the property owner to do anything.
  • Janiszewski told the board the denial standard: to deny, the board must provide evidence of how the plan is inconsistent with the comprehensive plan or land development code. She noted CPH and Public Works raised no objections during site plan distribution, and suggested tabling to bring a CPH or Public Works representative to present findings.
  • Level of service standard for Eudora Road is LOS D; Davis stated both intersections and the roadway itself operate at D or better.
  • Hand explained the appeal path available to the applicant if the board denied.
  • Board suggested relocating the dumpster to the southwest corner at the end of the drive-thru lane; the applicant said the dumpster cannot go in front per code and Medina said offsetting it would be a challenge.
  • After the vote, Davis clarified that a right-turn-only sign would be the development's and City's responsibility, but restricting access to Eudora Road is a Lake County decision.

Item 2: Mount Dora Small Bay Warehouses — PUD Amendment (PUD24-01)

• Type: PUD Amendment
• Case Number: PUD24-01
• Location: 1649 Lincoln Avenue
• Applicant: Lincoln 1649, LLC (owner); Metro Architecture Partnership (applicant); Tawill Engineering, Inc. (engineer); Landscape Dynamics (landscape architect)
• Request: Amend an expired PUD, including extension of the PUD expiration date from one year to four years, in anticipation of wastewater capacity becoming available.
• Current Zoning: PUD (expired)
• Proposed Zoning: PUD (amended)
• Acreage: [not available]
• Staff Recommendation: Approve
• Action: Tabled
• Vote: [tally not recorded — moved Beach, seconded Coombes]
• Conditions: Tabled so the applicant could correct inaccurate building elevations to comply with staff requirements.
• Notable Discussion:
  • This is where Mount Dora's structural constraint entered the record. Janiszewski located the site in the service area of Wastewater Treatment Plant 2 (southeast corner of US-441 and SR-46, adjacent to the solar farm), and stated plainly: there is still capacity at Plant 1 and none at Plant 2. Plant 1 sits west of the Golden Triangle shopping center, south of Old Eustis Road.
  • She clarified Plant 2 is overcommitted at this time, and that staff must account for older subdivision agreements when calculating available capacity.
  • Public Works is working on a project to mirror Plant 2, which would increase capacity. "Capacity isn't guaranteed in four years." Without a developer's agreement, the City will not commit capacity. "Site Plan can't be approved at this time because there isn't capacity."
  • Janiszewski explained the vesting consequence the board was actually voting on: if the PUD is approved, a later site plan does not have to comply with a new code if the code changes, because the PUD vests the standards. She expressed concern about denying or conditioning based on anticipated future code changes.
  • Hand added that an extension remains vested under current code, while a brand-new PUD would have to be compliant. Hand and Janiszewski noted the current code allows only a six-month extension through the Development Review Committee.
  • The board discussed denying until there is forecasted capacity, and suggested a twelve-month extension instead of four years.
  • Janiszewski confirmed site plan approval would be needed to remove trees, and that staff reviewed the landscaping plan and buffers for current code consistency.
  • The board asked that process slides be added back to the packets.

Item 3: Sunshine Law Presentation — City Attorney Andrew Hand

• Type: Other (board training)
• Case Number: N/A
• Location: N/A
• Applicant: City of Mount Dora
• Request: Sunshine Law presentation to the commission.
• Current Zoning: N/A
• Proposed Zoning: N/A
• Acreage: N/A
• Staff Recommendation: N/A
• Action: Tabled to the February meeting at the board's recommendation
• Vote: [none recorded]
• Conditions: None
• Notable Discussion: None recorded.

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 4 non-staff presenters, all appearing for applicants (Davis, Medina, White, Bricklemyer). No members of the public are recorded as speaking.
• General sentiment: No public opposition recorded.
• Key concerns: The concerns on the record came from the dais, not the public — traffic congestion and bottlenecking on Eudora Road, a recent roll-over accident at the site, and the absence of any west-side connection.

Key Signals

• Mount Dora's binding constraint is not zoning — it is Wastewater Treatment Plant 2, and staff said so on the record in January 2025. Janiszewski told the board Plant 2 is overcommitted, that a site plan "can't be approved at this time because there isn't capacity," and that the City will not commit capacity without a developer's agreement. Everything east of US-441 — where the majority of new development is proposed — drains to Plant 2. For a buyer, builder, or lender, the operative question in Mount Dora stopped being "can this be zoned?" and became "is this parcel on the committed list?"

• Developers responded to the capacity freeze by buying time, not by building. The Small Bay Warehouses applicant asked to stretch its PUD expiration from one year to four expressly "in anticipation of wastewater capacity becoming available." That is a land-banking posture dressed as an entitlement extension, and Mount Dora's code was not built for it: staff noted the code allows only a six-month administrative extension through the DRC. Expect more four-year asks, and expect the board to keep resisting them.

• A four-year PUD extension is a four-year code freeze. Janiszewski's clearest sentence of the meeting: if the PUD is approved, a later site plan "doesn't have to comply with the new code if it changes because the PUD would vest the standards." Mount Dora is simultaneously rewriting its landscaping and design standards and being asked to vest projects out of them for four years. Every extension granted now is a parcel the new rules will not reach.

• The board approved a restaurant it believed had a traffic problem, because staff told it the denial standard. Janiszewski's statement that denial requires evidence of inconsistency with the comprehensive plan or LDC — combined with the applicant's attorney's point that the compliant site plan cannot be held responsible for a neighbor's access design — converted a safety debate into a compliance finding. The board's remedy was a non-binding "preamble" asking staff and the attorney to call the adjacent owner. Anyone driving Eudora Road should note the fix the traffic engineer actually recommended, a three-way stop, is outside both the applicant's control and the City's.

• Four of seven members carried the meeting, and the board deferred its own leadership vote because of it. Elections were postponed to February for lack of full attendance, but the same thin board approved a contested site plan without a recorded tally. Mount Dora's January minutes record motions and movers but not vote counts — a documentation practice that changes materially by mid-2025.

Raw Notes

• Source provenance: Standalone minutes retrieved as CivicClerk file ID 5816 (event ID 1627, agendaId 956). The published minutes PDF is a scanned image of the signed original and required OCR; the same minutes appear as native, extractable text on pages 3–8 of the February 19, 2025 agenda packet (file ID 5813), which is the cheaper and cleaner retrieval path.
• The OCR'd signed copy renders the call-to-order year as "2023" in the opening sentence; the document header, the agenda, the CivicClerk event record, and the approval at the February 19, 2025 meeting all establish the meeting date as January 15, 2025. Treated as a scrivener's error in the source.
• Attribution of specific statements to individual commissioners is limited by the minutes' style: most exchanges are recorded as "Discussion on…" or "Board discussed…" without naming the speaker. Where a name appears above, it appears in the source.
• Other Business: discussion of the updated Land Development Code. Janiszewski said it would be forthcoming at upcoming meetings. The board stated it would like the LDC presented to City Council in March; Janiszewski said staff would try for March, otherwise the next available date. (It was not adopted in March; the rewrite was still before the board in mid-2026.)
• Public participation: Beach noted for the record that enhancements/fencing he had raised at the December meeting had since been added. Janiszewski said staff contacted the applicant, who provided renderings showing the enhancements.
• Adjournment 11:48 AM, moved Dring, seconded Coombes. Attested by Whitney Scott, Administrative Coordinator; signed by Chair Miles Beach.