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Meetings · Mount Dora

Mount Dora Planning and Zoning Commission — August 20, 2025 minutes

City of Mount Dora Planning and Zoning Commission — August 20, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (7 of 7 members present — full board) Duration: 10:03 AM – 11:16 AM (1 hour 13 minutes) Location: City Hall Board Room, 510 North Baker Street

Attendance

  • Present: Chairman Miles Beach, Adrian Coombes, Tom Dring, Harris Turner, Andrea Lother, Barbara Tietmeyer, Suzanne Scheck
  • Absent: None
  • Staff Present: Michele Janiszewski, Senior Planner; Ryan Winkler, Senior Planner; Alexandra Stevens, Administrative Coordinator; Andrew Hand, City Attorney (via Zoom)

Prior minutes: two sets approved. June 18, 2025 minutes approved 7-0 (moved Coombes, seconded Lother). July 16, 2025 minutes approved 7-0 (moved Coombes, seconded Lother) after an on-the-record correction — Turner noted the last-page JPA motion was attributed to "Mr. Harris" and should read "Mr. Turner"; Beach made the edit.

Agenda Items

Item 1: Sara T Rhodes Life Estate — Variance (VAR25-01)

  • Type: Variance
  • Case Number: VAR25-01
  • Location: 410 N Tremain Street
  • Applicant: Sara T Rhodes Life Estate (owner); ECO Construction Group LLC (applicant)
  • Request: Revised setback variance to allow replacement of existing non-conforming accessory structures with a new garage. Returning after being tabled July 16, 2025.
  • Current Zoning: [not stated in the minutes]
  • Proposed Zoning: N/A
  • Acreage: [not available]
  • Staff Recommendation: [not restated in the August minutes; staff found the original application inconsistent with LDC Section 2.1(6) in July]
  • Action: Tabled again
  • Vote: 7-0 (moved Scheck, seconded Turner)
  • Conditions: Tabled "based on discussions." The board asked for an accurate rendering showing both five-foot setbacks and demonstrating that a car will not fit.
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Procedural sequence followed: swearing in by the City Attorney, ex parte disclosure, staff/applicant presentation, public input, deliberation.
    • Tracey Rhodes presented the revised proposal after meeting with staff, asserting hardship due to access — getting into the garage without hitting the house or garage — and stating she is not responsible for special conditions that already exist because everything was already built.
    • Bobby (ECO Construction) submitted the plan for the public record.
    • The plan drifted from the July representation. The garage plan does not stay within the original 20x20 footprint; Rhodes stated the garage is 20x23, and that two cars fit in the current carport.
    • Lother: if the garage stays the same size as the original footprint, it can be moved the five feet to meet setbacks. Lisa Smith (ECO): they can't move it because of wall thickness — unlike the current carport, which is four posts and a roof.
    • Dring noted the rendering shows more than a five-foot setback and said a one-car garage would leave room for the setback.
    • Coombes observed it is the only one-story house on the block, and that making the garage two-story turns it into an accessory dwelling unit, not just a garage. Tietmeyer agreed.
    • Turner: "there is no hardship to needing to build a two-story garage." He also said the board should add as much setback as possible rather than leaving it as is.
    • Scheck's motion (before the tabling) was for a five-foot rear setback, leaving the side as-is, taking the building down to one story, and making it fit two cars.
    • Janiszewski stated the controlling rule: per code, you cannot use non-conforming structures or buildings to justify granting a variance. She also noted the design would go to the Historic Preservation Board if approved.
    • Smith stated for the record that they did not say they weren't enlarging the garage and that they were keeping the same footprint.
    • A site visit was requested and discouraged. Smith asked whether a site visit could be arranged; due to Sunshine Law the members could not all go at once, and Hand did not recommend it.

Item 2: Presentation — Planning Processes

  • Type: Other (staff presentation)
  • Case Number: N/A
  • Location: N/A
  • Applicant: City of Mount Dora
  • Request: Staff presentation on planning processes.
  • Staff Recommendation: N/A
  • Action: Presented; no motion
  • Vote: [none]
  • Conditions: None
  • Notable Discussion: Discussion of the City's adopted plans and studies; explanation of MuniCode; discussion of the Development Review Committee; discussion of setbacks for subdivisions. Coombes requested links to the adopted plans and studies.

Public Hearings Summary

  • Number of speakers: 1 member of the public in non-agenda participation — Steven Green, who recently moved to 1220 Dora Parc Lane and asked about the timeline for improvements to Clayton Road between 1st Avenue and Crane Avenue. Staff will provide him Public Works contact information. Applicant-side testimony on the variance from Tracey Rhodes, Bobby Rhodes, and Lisa Smith.
  • General sentiment: No organized opposition. The friction on the variance came entirely from the dais.
  • Key concerns: Whether an enlarged, two-story garage constitutes a hardship or an accessory dwelling unit; whether a non-conforming structure can justify a variance; road condition on Clayton Road.

Key Signals

  • The board found the hardship argument and took it apart in public. Turner's sentence — "there is no hardship to needing to build a two-story garage" — plus Janiszewski's statement that code forbids using non-conforming structures to justify a variance, plus Coombes' observation that a two-story garage becomes an accessory dwelling unit, is a complete doctrinal position on residential variances stated in one sitting. Anyone contemplating a setback variance in Mount Dora should read this meeting: the board wants a demonstrated physical impossibility, in a drawing, at the code's five feet.

  • A garage that grew from 20x20 to 20x23 between July and August cost the applicant two months and a third hearing. The applicant told the board in July they were rebuilding in the previous footprint; the August plan was larger. That discrepancy — surfaced by Lother and Dring reading the rendering — is why the item tabled a second time. Mount Dora's board reads drawings against prior testimony.

  • Sunshine Law is functioning as a site-visit prohibition in practice. Applicant counsel asked for a site visit; the members could not all attend at once, and the City Attorney did not recommend it. Combined with the July record — staff had not inspected the Lindsley Paving borrow pit, and Hand said inspection would be trespassing — Mount Dora's planning decisions are being made almost entirely on submitted paper. That is a structural feature of this board worth knowing before you rely on a site condition being noticed.

  • Barbara Tietmeyer announced October 2025 would be her last meeting. She had served through the full 2025 record and was a frequent mover on PUD items. October 15 was subsequently canceled, so her actual last meeting was September 17, 2025 — she is absent from the November roll and the seat is recorded as open until January 2026. The board that closes 2025 is materially different from the one that opened it.

  • The administrative record changed hands mid-year. Whitney Scott moves from Administrative Coordinator to Associate Planner and Alexandra Stevens takes the coordinator role in August; by March 2026 Theresa Willis is the coordinator. Minute-taking style shifts with each handoff — from the discursive narrative of early 2025, to the roll-call format of July, to the terse "Discussion on…" lists of 2026. Reading Mount Dora's record requires reading who was writing it.

  • Nothing entitlement-related moved in August. One tabled variance and a staff training presentation, in seventy-three minutes. Between the March wastewater briefing and the September OnSyte approval, Mount Dora's development docket is nearly empty — which is what a capacity freeze looks like in an agenda.

Raw Notes

  • Source provenance: Standalone minutes retrieved as CivicClerk file ID 6240 (event ID 2076, agendaId 1214). The published PDF is a scanned image of the signed original and required OCR. This document's OCR quality is noticeably lower than neighbouring months; several sentences in the variance discussion are fragmentary in the source scan and have been rendered above only where the meaning is unambiguous.
  • The minutes list an "Absent:" line with no names, and the roll records all seven members present.
  • The agenda also listed a Stormwater Presentation under Staff Updates as "in talks with Public Works." Janiszewski reported she was still waiting to hear back from Public Works. The stormwater presentation was ultimately delivered at the December 17, 2025 meeting by Stormwater Director George Marek.
  • Under announcements: discussion of the three homes on Highland at the beginning of the city limits (revisited at the January 21, 2026 meeting as "the Highland Main lots"). Lother announced she would be unable to attend the September 17 meeting.
  • Adjournment recorded as 11:16 PM in the source; the meeting began at 10:03 AM and the intended time is 11:16 AM. Moved Lother, seconded Tietmeyer, 7-0.
  • Attested by Alexandra Stevens, Administrative Coordinator; signed by Chairman Miles Beach.

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