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Meetings · Mount Dora

Mount Dora Planning and Zoning Commission — June 17, 2026 minutes

City of Mount Dora Planning and Zoning Commission — June 17, 2026

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (7 of 7 members present — full board) Duration: 10:00 AM – 11:12 AM (1 hour 12 minutes) Location: City Hall Board Room, 510 North Baker Street

Attendance

  • Present: Chair Adrian Coombes, Harris Turner, Lynn Tipton, Tom Dring, Andrea Lother, David Hoops, Suzanne Scheck
  • Absent: None
  • Staff Present: Michele Janiszewski, Deputy Planning Director; Andrew Hand, City Attorney; Andrew Marsian, Utilities Director; Theresa Willis, Administrative Coordinator

Prior minutes: May 20, 2026 minutes approved (moved Tipton, seconded Dring). The minutes record the tally as 5-0 although seven members were present and none absent.

Agenda Items

Item 1: Waterman Early Learning Center / Waterman Christian Academy — Conditional Use Permit (CUP25-01)

  • Type: Conditional Use Permit (CUP)
  • Case Number: CUP25-01 — Fourth Submittal
  • Location: 1303 Limit Avenue
  • Applicant: Waterman Early Learning Academy / Waterman Christian Academy (applicant); Florida Building Material Alliance, Inc. (owner). Appearing: David Clutts, Engineer; Betsy Mae Wilson; Angie Rivera.
  • Request: Conditional use permit for an early learning center / Christian academy at 1303 Limit Avenue.
  • Current Zoning: [not stated in the minutes]
  • Proposed Zoning: No change
  • Acreage: [not available]
  • Staff Recommendation: Approve, subject to site-plan approval
  • Action: Approved as presented
  • Vote: 7-0 (moved Scheck, seconded Tipton)
  • Conditions: Subject to site plan approval
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Enrollment is capped by sewer. The minutes record, consecutively: "Discussion on use of wastewater capacity" and "Discussion on the number of students is based on wastewater capacity." In Mount Dora, the binding constraint on a school's size is not classroom count or parking — it is gallons per day.
    • Discussion of the owner of the property; the playground; pick-up and drop-off location and timing; the age of students; and when 11 employees are present at the school.
    • Traffic on Limit Avenue was the substantive fight. Discussion of concerns about traffic off Limit Avenue; only turning right out of the property; a recommendation to Lake County for right-turn-only onto Limit Avenue; and the use of "right turn only" signs. Discussion of whether any commercial van or vehicle is parked on site.
    • Discussion of adding a right-turn lane and left-turn lane where the property lane meets Limit Avenue, with a recommendation to discuss the turn lanes with the Lake County Public Works Department.
    • Discussion that drainage ditches within wetland areas could slow down the project.

Item 2: Transportation Update — Andrew Marsian, Utilities Director

  • Type: Other (staff presentation)
  • Case Number: N/A
  • Location: Citywide; Tremain Street and Fourth Avenue named specifically
  • Applicant: City of Mount Dora Public Works
  • Request: Transportation update to the commission.
  • Staff Recommendation: N/A
  • Action: Presented; no motion
  • Vote: [none]
  • Conditions: None
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Discussion on applying for funding; ADA compliance items and materials; road resurfacing and maintenance; and the use of an outside company to evaluate road conditions.
    • Discussion on funding doubled to repair curbs and sidewalks.
    • Discussion of sidewalk and curb conditions; completion time of repairs; quality control; curbs within Tremain Street and Fourth Avenue; use of rebar or mesh within curbing; "Miami" curbs vs. Type "F" curbing; and how curb types interact with stormwater.
    • Status provided on the "One Way Streets" project. A request was made to have the project lead present an update at an upcoming P&Z meeting.
    • Discussion on converting railroad right of way to trails and the Trust for Public Lands.

Item 3: Landscaping Ordinance (Other Business / Staff Updates)

  • Type: Text Amendment (Land Development Code — landscaping)
  • Case Number: [no ordinance number assigned in the record]
  • Location: Citywide
  • Applicant: City of Mount Dora (staff-initiated)
  • Request: Continued review, returning from the May 20, 2026 tabling.
  • Staff Recommendation: Working draft
  • Action: No motion. A line-by-line review was requested for a future meeting.
  • Vote: [none]
  • Conditions: N/A
  • Notable Discussion:
    • "Discussion on the use of AI to prepare an analysis review of the Landscaping Ordinance" and "Discussion on City staff reevaluating the ordinance based on the AI analysis." The AI-summary thread opened at the May meeting has moved from reading packets to generating an analysis the staff would then work from.
    • "Discussion on Senate Bill 180 timeline of October 2027 and code changes."
    • "Discussion on staff presenting what items are not affected by the restrictions of Senate Bill 180."
    • Request to go over the Landscaping Ordinance line by line at a future meeting; discussion of reviewing pages 73 to 80 of the June 17, 2026 agenda packet to reduce review time.
    • Discussion of Tree Bank costs, twice, and of residents requesting trees from the Tree Bank.
    • Discussion of fines for individual property owners where landscaping dies before the required maintenance time; whether the ordinance will apply to new developers and/or all existing homeowners; and elderly residents affording landscape requirements and replacements.
    • Discussion that landscaping replacements are currently happening within the City after this past winter freeze.

Public Hearings Summary

  • Number of speakers: 0 members of the public. Public participation on non-agenda items is recorded as "None." Hand swore in staff and attendees for the CUP item; applicant-side appearances by David Clutts (engineer), Betsy Mae Wilson, and Angie Rivera.
  • General sentiment: No opposition recorded.
  • Key concerns: Traffic and turning movements onto Limit Avenue — a county road, requiring a recommendation to Lake County Public Works rather than a city condition; wetland drainage ditches as a schedule risk.

Key Signals

  • Mount Dora sized a school by its sewer allocation. "Discussion on the number of students is based on wastewater capacity" is the most compact statement of this city's governing constraint anywhere in the record. Eighteen months after staff told the board Plant 2 was overcommitted, the capacity ledger is now directly setting the enrollment of a private academy on Limit Avenue. Any institutional or residential use in Mount Dora's Plant 2 service area should expect its intensity to be negotiated in gallons per day before it is negotiated in units or seats.

  • A fourth submittal cleared 7-0 — the CUP took roughly a year. CUP25-01 carries a 2025 case number and reached approval in June 2026 on its fourth submittal, then only "subject to site plan approval." Mount Dora's conditional use path for institutional uses is long and iterative, and the entitlement is not final at the CUP.

  • The board's only real lever on Limit Avenue traffic is a recommendation to Lake County. Right-turn-only movements, right-turn-only signage, and adding turn lanes at the property entrance all sit with Lake County Public Works, not the City. This is the recurring boundary problem in Mount Dora — the JPA fight, the Eudora Road three-way stop in January 2025, the Round Lake Road signal, and now Limit Avenue all end with the city recommending to the county. A resident's traffic complaint in Mount Dora frequently has a county address.

  • The corpus's Senate Bill 180 sunset date is corroborated at October 2027 by a first-party municipal record. The June 17, 2026 minutes record "Senate Bill 180 timeline of October 2027 and code changes," and the board asked staff to present which items are not affected by the restrictions of SB 180. That matches the statutory reading (Ch. 2025-190) rather than the mid-2026 self-expiry that circulates in secondary summaries. Mount Dora is planning its landscaping rewrite around an October 2027 clock, and its own attorney and staff are treating that as the operative horizon.

  • The board asked AI to analyze its ordinance and asked staff to reevaluate the ordinance based on that analysis. In May the question was whether ChatGPT summaries of packets are public records. In June the commission is discussing an AI-prepared analysis of the Landscaping Ordinance that City staff would then work from. This is a municipal advisory board inserting a machine-generated document into the drafting chain of a land development code — with the public-records question from the previous month still unanswered.

  • A hard freeze is already forcing landscape replacement across the city while the code governing replacement is unwritten. "Landscaping replacements is currently happening within the City after this past winter freeze," alongside discussion of fines for property owners whose landscaping dies before the required maintenance period elapses. The board is watching the enforcement scenario play out in real time on the old code, which is sharpening its reluctance to make the new one retroactive.

Raw Notes

  • Source provenance: Standalone minutes retrieved as CivicClerk file ID 6708, published as "June 17, 2026, Planning and Zoning Commission Minutes" (event ID 2071, agendaId 1322). This is the only P&Z minutes file in the coverage window published as a native-text PDF rather than a scanned image of a signed copy — no OCR required.
  • The CivicClerk event name for this meeting is recorded simply as "Planning and Zoning Commission" without a date.
  • The prior-minutes tally is recorded as 5-0 with all seven members present and none absent; the minutes do not reconcile the discrepancy and record no abstentions.
  • Janiszewski had announced at the May 20, 2026 meeting that she would not attend this meeting due to a conference; she nonetheless appears in the staff roll and presented the CUP summary.
  • The applicant name appears with OCR-style substitutions in the source ("Prope1iy Address," "CUP25-0l," "10:00 a.rn."); rendered above in corrected form where unambiguous.
  • The signature block records Theresa Willis, Administrative Coordinator; the Chair line is present but the name is not rendered in the extracted text.
  • Adjournment 11:12 AM, moved Tipton, seconded Lother.

Connected records

1 connected record

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