City of Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — June 18, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting (acting as Local Planning Agency) — rescheduled from Tuesday, June 10 to Wednesday, June 18 by published notice Quorum: Yes (4 of 5 members plus Alternate) Duration: 101 minutes (called 6:30 PM, recess 7:28–7:34 PM, adjourned 8:11 PM)

Attendance

• Present: Chair Lomneck, Vice-Chair Forges, Member Keller, Member Chacon, Alternate Member Butler
• Absent: Member Galvan
• Staff Present: Planner Belizaire; Zoning Manager Whitfield; Urban Designer Parish; Assistant City Manager Rumer; Board Attorney Griffith; Recording Clerk Justice

Agenda Items

Consent: Minutes of the May 13, 2025 Meeting

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

Item 1: 703 Center Street — Mazariegos Property Annexation & Rezoning

• Type: Annexation + Rezoning (two motions)
• Case Number: AX-05-25-05 (annexation); RZ-25-05-05 (rezoning)
• Location: 703 Center Street
• Applicant: Mazariegos (property owner; not present at the hearing)
• Request: Annex the parcel and rezone from Orange County R-1 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 — retained
• Acreage: [not available in the minutes; no staff report published for this meeting]
• Staff Recommendation: Approve — Planner Belizaire reported the property is logical and eligible for annexation and furthers the City's enclave-reduction effort
• Action: Approved — recommendations of approval forwarded to the City Commission on both motions
• Vote: 5-0 annexation (motion by Keller, second by Chacon); 5-0 rezoning (motion by Butler, second by Forges); Galvan absent
• Conditions: None
• Notable Discussion: Vice-Chair Forges asked whether the property already had a house; Belizaire confirmed it did. City water is available; the property continues on private septic. No speaker forms were received.

Miscellaneous 1: Workshop — Land Development Code Update

• Type: Workshop (no action)
• Presented by: Zoning Manager Whitfield and Urban Designer Parish
• Scope of the rewrite as presented: definitions; application submittal requirements and review procedures; zoning classifications and permissible uses; development standards transitioning the City "from suburban to urban patterns." The reorganized code is proposed to feature a provision for administrative waiver, simplified development standards for single-family and duplex dwellings, enhanced urban and architectural design standards inside the Downtown Mixed-Use District, and administrative amendment to the Zoning Map.
• Notable Discussion:
  • Vice-Chair Forges questioned the proposed elimination of the minimum living area requirement in certain zoning districts. Discussion ensued; the board determined additional research would be done and a compatibility clause considered. Urban Designer Parish explained the reasoning for introducing smaller living area sizes. (By the August 12, 2025 workshop this had reversed into affirmative minimums — 1,000 sq ft single-family and 650 sq ft per duplex unit in the Traditional Neighborhood District.)
  • Whitfield summarized existing non-residential classifications and described fieldwork conducted to inform square-footage standards for the proposed categories.
  • Development standards were presented by product type — building siting, site design, building design, and accessory structures — differentiated between suburban and urban patterns.
  • Parish raised neighborhood character with respect to minimum square footage, massing, and architectural standards in established neighborhoods.
  • Forges asked where lodging fits in the non-residential classifications and about zoning for adult entertainment versus a night club; Whitfield and Assistant City Manager Rumer responded.
  • Member Chacon asked about accessibility.
  • Parish said language is proposed to restrict or omit faux façade treatments and to regulate building scale through articulation.
  • Member Keller asked about bicyclist comfort alongside pedestrians in the design standards; Parish mentioned a possible bicycle and pedestrian trail conversion project and potential trail connections citywide.
  • Whitfield presented implementation of the 15-Minute City concept from Envision 2045, reviewing a zoning map of potential commercial zones within quarter-mile and half-mile radii of residential areas. Chacon observed the map showed no such zones on the south side of the City; Whitfield explained that area is already zoned for and well served by commercial uses, and that many residents there live in gated communities where biking or walking to commercial areas is less common.

Miscellaneous 2: Project Status Report

• Zoning Manager Whitfield reported: the Clarke Road cell phone tower is complete; staff are working on the Everest Rehabilitation Hospital certificate of occupancy; the Lake Lilly Lot 1 site plan is in first review; the pickleball project has been re-submitted as an all-indoor facility; Gardenia subdivision has submitted its first subdivision-plan application; Walmart Neighborhood Market is in its second round of review; the northwest corner of commercial for Ocoee Village Center has been through first review.
• Chair Lomneck proposed moving the meeting start time from 6:30 PM to 6:15 PM beginning July 8. Whitfield said Planning staff had no issue; Recording Clerk Justice said she would take it to the City Clerk. Board members present voiced no objection. (The change was formally moved and recommended to the City Commission on July 8, 2025.)
• Whitfield announced the election of Chair and Vice-Chair at the July meeting and asked all members to attend.

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 0 (no speaker forms received on the single quasi-judicial item)
• General sentiment: N/A
• Key concerns: None recorded

Key Signals

• The pickleball complex was re-submitted as an all-indoor facility before it ever reached a vote — the concession preceded the hearing. Buried in a June status report, one line records that the Vasant Sports project changed form between submittals. It came back to the board September 9, 2025 and was recommended for approval 4-0 with The Hammocks neighborhood's concerns logged. The corpus has treated pickleball as a recurring Ocoee use class across four appearances; this line supplies the missing mechanism. The enclosure happened administratively, in review, without a public hearing generating it — which is where the noise question actually got resolved. The contrast with the March 10, 2026 Thomas Property private-court variance (denied 4-0) is now legible: the commercial applicant redesigned to eliminate the externality and passed; the residential applicant did not and failed.
• This meeting is where Ocoee's LDC rewrite briefly pointed the opposite direction on minimum house size. On June 18 staff proposed eliminating minimum living area in certain districts, and Vice-Chair Forges pushed back hard enough that the board sent it out for more research plus a compatibility clause. Eight weeks later the August 12 workshop presented affirmative minimums — 1,000 sq ft single-family, 650 sq ft per duplex unit in the Traditional Neighborhood District. A deregulatory move on unit size was reversed by board pressure inside a single summer. For anyone modelling what Ocoee's code will permit, the workshop record is not a monotonic loosening; it is contested, and the board has already moved staff once.
• The rewrite's real payload is procedural: administrative waiver plus administrative Zoning Map amendment. Both were presented as headline features of the reorganized code. Together they move two decisions that currently require a public hearing — dimensional relief and map corrections — onto a staff desk. That is the same structural move the corpus tracks in the recovery-residence ordinances across five cities, where the federally protected use lands on the Development Services Director's desk rather than the board's. Ocoee is proposing it as general practice, not as a compliance carve-out. Watch which decisions actually migrate when the code finally adopts.
• Envision 2045's 15-Minute City language is now operational geography, and the south side is excluded by design. Whitfield presented a map of commercial zones drawn at quarter- and half-mile radii from residential areas — the walkability envelope made cartographic. When Chacon flagged that south Ocoee carried none, the stated rationale was that the area is already commercially served and that gated-community residents don't walk to shops. That is a policy judgment about which neighborhoods receive the 15-minute treatment, recorded in a workshop rather than an ordinance. It will show up later as zoning-map geometry.
• The June 10 meeting was rescheduled to June 18, and the only proof it convened is the minutes buried in the July packet. The portal's June event carries a one-page notice and nothing else — no packet, no minutes, no agenda items. The record of what happened on June 18 exists solely as pages 2–5 of the July 8, 2025 agenda packet. Ocoee's published-file surface systematically undercounts its own meeting record; a reader working from event listings alone would conclude this meeting never happened.

Raw Notes

Source: Ocoee CivicClerk tenant ocoeefl, P&Z category id=27. The June event (agendaId 510 / Events(362)) is titled "Planning & Zoning Commission Meeting Rescheduled to June 18, 2025" and publishes exactly one file — fileId 1058, a single-page notice reading: "NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, that the TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2025, Planning & Zoning Commission Meeting has been RESCHEDULED to WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 2025, AT 6:30 P.M." No separate June 18 event exists in the portal.

This document is built entirely from the June 18, 2025 minutes as embedded at pages 2–5 of the July 8, 2025 agenda packet (agendaId 511, fileId 1100). The wave-2 survey listed this meeting as ambiguous and deliberately excluded it for want of a source document; the July packet supplies that source. The minutes are text-extractable, signed by Recording Clerk Miranda Justice and Chair Brad Lomneck, and were approved by the Commission at the July 8, 2025 meeting.

Because no agenda packet was published for this meeting, no staff report exists for the 703 Center Street item — acreage, parcel ID, and the Development Review Committee date are unavailable. Everything recorded above about the item comes from Planner Belizaire's oral presentation as minuted.

Board Attorney Griffith appears at this meeting only. City Attorney Geller sat May 13, 2025; Board Attorney Johnson sits from July 8, 2025 forward.