Zoning Signal

Meetings · Ocoee

Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — May 13, 2025 minutes

City of Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — May 13, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting (acting as Local Planning Agency) Quorum: Yes (4 of 5 members plus Alternate) Duration: 71 minutes wall-clock (called 6:30 PM, immediate recess to 6:59 PM for the City's Centennial Time Capsule event, adjourned 7:41 PM)

Attendance

  • Present: Chair Lomneck, Vice-Chair Forges, Member Keller, Member Galvan, Alternate Member Butler
  • Absent: Member Chacon
  • Staff Present: Planner Belizaire; Zoning Manager Whitfield; City Attorney Geller; Recording Clerk Justice

Agenda Items

Consent: Minutes of the April 8, 2025 Meeting

  • Type: Consent (minutes approval)
  • Action: Approved
  • Vote: 5-0 (motion by Keller, second by Butler; Chacon absent)

Item 1: 508, 518 & 524 Woodson Avenue — Legacy Homes FL LLC Annexation & Rezoning

  • Type: Annexation + Rezoning (three parcels, six separate motions)
  • Case Number: AX-04-25-02, AX-04-25-03, AX-04-25-04 (annexations); RZ-25-04-02, RZ-25-04-03, RZ-25-04-04 (rezonings)
  • Location: 508, 518 and 524 Woodson Avenue — Commission District 2, west side of Woodson Avenue south of Center Street. Parcel IDs 17-22-28-0000-00-076 (508), 17-22-28-0000-00-093 (518), 17-22-28-0000-00-039 (524)
  • Applicant: Legacy Homes FL LLC (owner/applicant; not present at the hearing)
  • Request: Annex three contiguous vacant lots and rezone from Orange County R-1 (Single-Family Dwelling District) to City of Ocoee R-1A (Single-Family Dwelling District)
  • Current Zoning: Orange County R-1
  • Proposed Zoning: City of Ocoee R-1A
  • Current FLU: Low Density Residential (4 units per acre) — unchanged by the request
  • Acreage: 0.38 ac (508), 0.38 ac (518), 0.35 ac (524) — 1.11 acres combined
  • Staff Recommendation: Approve. The Development Review Committee met May 6, 2025 and recommended approval on a finding of consistency with City regulations and the Ocoee–Orange County Joint Planning Area Agreement
  • Action: Approved — recommendation of approval forwarded to the City Commission on all six motions
  • Vote: 5-0 on each of the six motions (Chacon absent)
  • Conditions: None
  • Notable Discussion: Member Keller asked whether the properties needed to be annexed in a particular order; the board determined motions would run north to south. Chair Lomneck asked which project number attached to which address and, with City Attorney Geller's concurrence, announced addresses rather than project numbers in the motions. Lomneck handed the gavel down the line (Forges to Keller) to move the final rezoning himself. All three lots are vacant, city water is available, and the properties will continue on private septic.

Item 2: 1561 Dusty Pine Drive — Fermaint Property Variance

  • Type: Variance (two variances, one motion)
  • Case Number: VR-25-01
  • Location: 1561 Dusty Pine Drive — Commission District 1, within the Forest Lake Estates PUD. Parcel ID 32-22-28-9285-00-740 (Lot 270), 6,011 sq ft
  • Applicant: Edwin and Monica Fermaint (property owners; both spoke)
  • Request: (1) Exceed the Forest Lake Estates PUD's maximum 65% impervious surface area by 4% — approximately 261 sq ft, for a total 4,168 sq ft ISA, a 6.7% variance; (2) reduce the Land Development Code Article V § 5-4D minimum 2-foot side setback for impervious materials to 1.5 feet, a 25% variance — so that pavers, a concrete patio, a fire pit, a tree surround, and a concrete basketball slab already installed without permits could remain
  • Current Zoning: PUD-LD (Planned Unit Development — Low Density)
  • Acreage: 0.14 acres (6,011 sq ft lot; 3,907 sq ft maximum allowed ISA)
  • Staff Recommendation: Deny. Staff found the application failed all four variance criteria in Article IV § 4-9A — no special conditions peculiar to the lot (rectangular, same dimensions as neighbors), no deprivation of common rights (the as-built residence used ~32% ISA, leaving ~1,984 sq ft of compliant capacity), circumstances resulting from the applicant's own unpermitted work, and a grant conferring special privilege
  • Action: Denied — recommendation of denial forwarded to the City Commission
  • Vote: 4-1 (motion by Butler, second by Forges; Member Keller opposed; Chacon absent)
  • Conditions: N/A
  • Notable Discussion: Code Enforcement cited the property for unpermitted pavers in the front and side yards; staff found additional unpermitted rear-yard work while reviewing the corrective building permit. The applicants said they believed the paver installer had pulled permits, and that side pavers were placed to stop erosion exposing the foundation. Applicant-stated existing ISA was 67.65%. A concurrent easement-vacation application is pending on a separate track; staff advised the 10-foot rear electrical distribution easement (Plat Note 12) is unlikely to be vacated, and that with the concrete inside that easement counted, ISA runs "well above 65%." Member Keller clarified for the record that a yes vote was a vote to recommend denial, then explained his opposition. Chair Lomneck stated that the Planning & Zoning Commission "has maintained a consistent approach regarding ISA ratio decisions" while noting the board is advisory. Zoning Manager Whitfield offered that narrowing side walkways from 3.5 to 3 feet might provide relief if the remaining ISA issue were resolved.

Miscellaneous: Project Status Report

  • Zoning Manager Whitfield reported: The Backyard opens Wednesday as the City's first official dog-friendly restaurant; Wawa is open; Envision 2045 outreach meeting May 28, 2025 (6:00–8:00 PM); staff are reviewing current zoning districts as part of the Land Development Code update "in an effort to bring the City to a more urban form while protecting the outer limits of the City boundaries"; no movement on permitting for City Center West Orange; Walmart Neighborhood Market plans for Ocoee Village Center are in their second round of review.
  • Vice-Chair Forges asked where the Walmart Neighborhood Market would sit; Whitfield described the location and a second gas station to be built in conjunction with the market, and said the northwest corner of Clarcona-Ocoee Road would carry a two-building retail plaza, in first review.
  • Chair Lomneck noted Einstein Bagels opened.

Public Hearings Summary

  • Number of speakers: 2 (both on Item 2; Item 1 drew no speaker forms)
  • General sentiment: Supportive of the variance
  • Key concerns: Sherwood Brown (1408 Dusty Pine Drive) and Rajesh Roopchan (7605 Dusty Pine Drive) each spoke in support of the Fermaint variance. No opposition testimony was recorded.

Key Signals

  • Ocoee's impervious-surface rule is the code provision that generates its variance docket — and this is the case that set the board's posture. The Fermaint denial recommendation is the earliest ISA case in the Ocoee record, and Chair Lomneck put the doctrine on the record explicitly: the board "has maintained a consistent approach regarding ISA ratio decisions." That posture held through the March 10, 2026 Thomas Property pickleball variance (denied 4-0). Read against the June 9 and July 14, 2026 workshops — where Development Services Director Lepp proposed retiring the term "impervious surface" for "lot coverage" and "open space," and floated a temporary policy to loosen residential coverage while the LDC is frozen — this meeting is the origin point of a fourteen-month arc: a rule that produced repeat enforcement-driven denials is now being rewritten by staff rather than relaxed case-by-case by the board.
  • The enforcement sequence, not the variance, is the transferable lesson. Pavers went in without permits; Code Enforcement cited the front and side yards; the corrective building-permit review surfaced more unpermitted work in the rear; the survey and impervious calculation sheet omitted it. Two neighbors testified in support and the request still drew a 4-1 denial recommendation. For anyone buying in a PUD-platted Ocoee subdivision, the binding number is not the zoning district's coverage limit but the subdivision plan's — Forest Lake Estates caps single-family lots at 65% by its 2015 Preliminary/Final Subdivision Plan, and side and rear easements (5-foot drainage/utility, 5-foot wall, 10-foot electrical distribution) remove buildable surface before the percentage is even calculated.
  • Small-lot enclave annexation is Ocoee's steady-state pipeline, and it runs on a fixed script. Three vacant Woodson Avenue lots totaling 1.11 acres came in as six motions in one sitting, each reciting the same findings: contiguity under § 171.044 F.S., consistency with the Ocoee–Orange County Joint Planning Area Agreement, no new enclave created, FLU unchanged, city water available, septic retained. The same script runs at 703 Center Street (June 2025), 977 East Crown Point Road (July 2025), and 5068 Adair Street (June 2026). Ocoee's boundary is thickening lot by lot on the west-Orange fringe, below the threshold at which any single case draws attention.
  • The Walmart Neighborhood Market arrives as a two-fuel-position corridor node, and the record says so a year before the sign fight. Whitfield's May 2025 status note — market plus "a second gas station to be built in conjunction with the market," plus a two-building retail plaza at the northwest corner of Clarcona-Ocoee Road — establishes that Ocoee Village Center was conceived as a fuel-anchored commercial cluster, not a standalone grocery. That project reached preliminary site plan approval October 14, 2025 (Lowndes Law, McGregor Love) and returned June 9, 2026 asking for a 360% wall-sign area variance, which the board denied 5-0.
  • City Center West Orange is stalled at the permitting stage as of May 2025 — a full year before the CDD unlocks it. "No movement with regards to permitting for City Center West Orange" is the earliest datestamp in the corpus for that stall. The April 14, 2026 status report records the release: Assistant City Manager Rumer said a Cambria Hotel update was anticipated "now that they have moved forward with the City Center West Orange CDD." Eleven months of dormancy resolved by a special-district financing step, not by a zoning action.

Raw Notes

Source: Ocoee CivicClerk tenant ocoeefl, P&Z category id=27, agendaId 509 / Events(361). Three published files: Agenda (fileId 1035), Agenda Packet (fileId 1037, 50 pages), and standalone Minutes (fileId 1083).

Extraction note — this document departs from the standing Ocoee method. The city's standalone Minutes PDFs are scanned images with no OCR layer (pdftotext returns zero lines), and the established workaround is to read the prior meeting's minutes out of the following month's agenda packet. That path does not exist for May 13, 2025: the June 10, 2025 meeting was formally rescheduled to June 18 and its only published file is a one-page reschedule notice, so the May minutes never appeared in a downstream packet. They were recovered instead by running tools/ocr-pdf.py against the scanned Minutes PDF (5 pages at 300 DPI, ~10.7k characters). OCR artifacts appear in the raw text — bullet glyphs render as e / ¢, "LDR" appears as "_.DR", and the signature block is partially illegible — but the substantive content (motions, votes, names, addresses, project numbers, dollar-free numeric values) is clean and was cross-checked against the agenda and the packet staff reports.

Structured detail for both items came from the agenda packet staff reports (Woodson Avenue at packet pages 4–20; Fermaint at packet pages 24–30), both authored by Planner I Berenice Belizaire under Department Director Ginger Corless.

Attorney presence is worth tracking: City Attorney Geller sat at this meeting, Board Attorney Griffith at June 18, 2025, and Board Attorney Johnson from July 8, 2025 forward — three different counsel across three consecutive meetings. Geller returns as City Attorney at the July 14, 2026 meeting to deliver Sunshine Law training.

The Fermaint easement-vacation application was pending on a separate track at the time of this hearing; its disposition is not in the P&Z record. The variance recommendation forwards to the City Commission for final action.

Connected records

2 connected records

Corridors1

Places1