City of Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — July 8, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting (acting as Local Planning Agency) — annual officer elections Quorum: Yes (5 of 5 members plus Alternate; no absences) Duration: 62 minutes (called 6:30 PM, adjourned 7:32 PM)

Attendance

• Present: Chair Lomneck, Vice-Chair Forges, Member Keller, Member Chacon, Member Galvan, Alternate Member Butler
• Absent: None
• Staff Present: Planner Belizaire; Development Services Deputy Director Whitfield; Urban Designer Parish; Board Attorney Johnson; Recording Clerk Justice

Agenda Items

Annual Elections: Chair and Vice-Chair

• Type: Officer election
• Action: Chair Lomneck re-elected for a term ending July 2026 (nominated by Forges, seconded by Chacon; carried unanimously). Chair Lomneck handed the gavel to Member Chacon and nominated Forges for Vice-Chair, term ending July 2026 (seconded by Keller; carried unanimously)
• Vote: Unanimous on both

Consent 1: Minutes of the June 18, 2025 Meeting

• Type: Consent (minutes approval)
• Action: Approved
• Vote: Unanimous (motion by Keller, second by Forges)

Consent 2: Proposed Planning & Zoning Meeting Time Change

• Type: Administrative recommendation
• Request: Move the Planning & Zoning Commission meeting start time from 6:30 PM to 6:15 PM
• Action: Recommendation of approval forwarded to the City Commission
• Vote: Unanimous (motion by Forges, second by Galvan)

Item 1: 977 East Crown Point Road — Showers of Grace Evangelical Christian Mission Inc. Annexation & Rezoning

• Type: Annexation + Rezoning (two motions)
• Case Number: AX-05-25-06 (annexation); RZ-25-05-06 (rezoning)
• Location: 977 East Crown Point Road — Commission District 3, east side of East Crown Point Road approximately 0.4 miles north of Palm Drive. Parcel ID 12-22-27-0000-00-034
• Applicant: Showers of Grace Evangelical Christian Mission Inc. ("Showers of Grace Church"), represented by Leonardo Vasquez
• Request: Annex an operating religious institution and rezone from Orange County A-1 (Citrus Rural District) to City of Ocoee RCE-2 (Rural Country Estates District)
• Current Zoning: Orange County A-1
• Proposed Zoning: City of Ocoee RCE-2
• Current FLU: Low Density Residential (4 units per acre) — retained
• Acreage: 9.09 acres
• Staff Recommendation: Approve. Contiguous on the east and south to city limits; consistent with the Ocoee–Orange County Joint Planning Area Agreement and the adopted FLUM; reduces existing enclaves
• Action: Approved — recommendations of approval forwarded to the City Commission on both motions
• Vote: Unanimous on both (annexation moved by Keller, seconded by Chacon; rezoning moved by Keller, seconded by Chacon)
• Conditions: The rezoning recommendation carried a condition — approval "conditionally subject to the submittal of an offsite plan for the water extension to include a fire hydrant and flushing apparatus." City water is available from an existing 8-inch potable main, but the main must be extended to the north property line with a public hydrant and automatic flusher installed; the owner's engineer must verify the 8-inch main provides adequate fire service or the owner must upsize it. Sewer lines are available but require extension; the site is on private septic
• Notable Discussion: Vice-Chair Forges asked what businesses surround the property; Belizaire responded. No speaker forms were received. The parcel abuts City of Winter Garden R-1 land to the west occupied by another religious institute, and Ocoee PUD-IND industrial land to the east and south — a church parcel sitting on the seam between two cities and an industrial district

Miscellaneous 1: LDC Workshop — Non-Conformities, Signage, Parking

• Type: Workshop (no action)
• Presented by: Development Services Deputy Director Whitfield
• Scope: non-conforming structures and use regulations; signage; vehicular and bicycle parking ratios and designs
• Notable Discussion:
  • Whitfield distinguished legal from illegal non-conforming uses and structures and described proposed changes to compliance timeframes and repair-ratio requirements.
  • Chair Lomneck asked what a new tenant would be required to fix when moving into a downtown building carrying existing nonconformities after the current tenant vacates. Discussion followed on architecture and allowed uses. Member Keller asked whether the situation falls under the Kaufman Law; Board Attorney Johnson responded.
  • Member Galvan warned that use restrictions may discourage investors from purchasing downtown property. Whitfield asked whether he meant investors interested in auto sales specifically; discussion ensued. Board Attorney Johnson advised further research was required, and discussion turned to depriving an owner of its property and diminished sales value when a non-conforming existing use is no longer allowed.
  • Forges asked what constitutes abandonment of property; discussion covered residential versus non-residential application and a change in tenancy versus a change in ownership.
  • Whitfield described changes and additions to signage requirements: appearance, size, materials, lighting, landscaping, area and copy-area calculations, sight-distance-triangle safety, and prohibited and exempt signage. Lomneck asked about incorporating downtown master plan signage specifications into the updated LDC.
  • Keller asked about political-sign timeframes and flashing EMC signs at public schools; Whitfield advised the existing political-sign provisions (Article VIII § 8-6.G., amended by Ordinance No. 2022-07) remain unchanged.
  • Whitfield detailed proposed vehicular parking ratios, required bicycle parking, and a requirement to evaluate alternative parking and ridesharing options. Lomneck asked about low-speed-vehicle (golf cart) language and parking; Forges asked about low-speed-vehicle parking requirements versus allowances where such vehicles are permitted.

Miscellaneous 2: Project Status Report

• Whitfield announced the date, time, and location for the community meeting on the proposed 7-Eleven at the intersection of Clarke Road and Ocoee Vista Parkway.

Public Hearings Summary

• Number of speakers: 0 (no speaker forms received)
• General sentiment: N/A
• Key concerns: None recorded

Key Signals

• A 9.09-acre church annexed into Ocoee in July; five weeks later the Chair and Member Keller argued every church should require a special exception in every district that allows one. Showers of Grace came in as an existing religious institution on Low Density Residential land, rezoned to RCE-2 — a rural-estates district, not a use-specific one — and passed unanimously with no discussion of the use itself. At the August 12, 2025 LDC workshop, Lomneck and Keller advanced the position that churches should be special-exception uses everywhere. The sequence matters: the board approved the largest religious-institution parcel in its recent record without a use filter, then moved to build one. Nine acres of institutionally held land on the Winter Garden seam, with FLU permitting four units per acre, is exactly the "churches are hidden land banks" configuration the corpus tracks in Lake County.
• Ocoee rezones with conditions — the water-extension condition on this rezoning is a mechanism worth naming. The board did not approve the RCE-2 rezoning outright; it approved it "conditionally subject to the submittal of an offsite plan for the water extension to include a fire hydrant and flushing apparatus." A rezoning is a legislative act; attaching an infrastructure deliverable to it binds the entitlement to a capital obligation the applicant must fund before the zoning has practical effect. This is the same instinct that produced the brand-and-user-bound Special Exception condition on the Holiday Inn Express in March 2026 — Ocoee attaches performance conditions to entitlement classes that usually travel unconditioned.
• The July 2025 signage workshop is the direct antecedent of the June 2026 Walmart sign denial. Whitfield walked the board through sign area and copy-area calculations, canopy provisions, and prohibited signage as items the LDC update would modernize. Eleven months later, the Walmart Neighborhood Market asked for a 459.7 sq ft wall sign against a 100 sq ft cap, and the staff report conceded the canopy provision was being applied by analogy because the code only contemplates signs under an awning — noting "this sign type along with other signage will be addressed with the Land Development Code (LDC) update." The board denied 5-0. Ocoee knows its sign code is dated, cannot fix it while SB 180 freezes substantial LDC amendments, and is enforcing it literally in the meantime. That is the operative risk for any national retailer bringing a prototype sign package to Ocoee before the code lifts.
• A 7-Eleven at Clarke Road and Ocoee Vista Parkway entered community-meeting stage in July 2025 — the gas-station bellwether reaches Ocoee's interior. The corpus has tracked convenience-store-with-fuel proposals as the leading indicator of rooftop counts crossing a corridor threshold, and tracked their denials (Clermont's Wellness Way 7-Eleven) as the counter-signal. Ocoee's version sits at an interior arterial intersection, not a highway interchange, and arrives the same season the LDC workshop proposed a capacity-impact-regardless-of-square-footage review trigger explicitly aimed at small-footprint, high-trip fuel uses. The code change and the application are moving toward each other.
• Member Galvan put the downtown non-conformity problem on the record as an investment-deterrence argument, and the board attorney could not resolve it. Galvan's concern — that tightening use restrictions discourages investors from buying downtown property — drew a discussion of deprivation of property rights and diminished sale value, and Johnson advising that further research was required. Ocoee's downtown redevelopment strategy depends on capital acquiring buildings that carry legal non-conformities; the code rewrite proposes to shorten compliance timeframes and adjust repair ratios, which changes what a buyer inherits. Unresolved in July 2025, the question is now frozen alongside the rest of the LDC update.

Raw Notes

Source: Ocoee CivicClerk tenant ocoeefl, P&Z category id=27, agendaId 511 / Events(363). Three published files: Agenda (fileId 1098), Agenda Packet (fileId 1100, 25 pages), and standalone Minutes (fileId 1159).

The standalone Minutes PDF is a scanned image with no text layer. Per the established Ocoee method, the minutes text used here was read from pages 1–4 of the August 12, 2025 agenda packet (agendaId 528, fileId 1149), where the July 8 minutes appear as the front matter. The 977 East Crown Point Road staff report was read from the July 8 agenda packet itself (pages 5–10), authored by Planner I Berenice Belizaire under Department Director Ginger Corless.

This meeting is the origin of the 6:15 PM start time that every subsequent Ocoee P&Z meeting in the corpus carries — the board recommended the change on July 8, 2025 after Lomneck raised it informally at the June 18 workshop.

Board Attorney Johnson first appears here and sits through at least June 9, 2026. Department Director of record on the July staff report is Ginger Corless; by the June 2026 staff reports the department director line reads Nick Lepp.

Officer terms set at this meeting — Lomneck as Chair and Forges as Vice-Chair, both "ending in July 2026" — resolve at the July 14, 2026 meeting, where Lomneck is no longer on the board, Forges is elected Chair, and Chacon is elected Vice-Chair.