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Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — July 14, 2026 minutes

City of Ocoee Planning & Zoning Commission — July 14, 2026

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting (acting as Local Planning Agency) — annual officer elections; no New Business Quorum: Yes (5 of 5 members plus Alternate; no absences) Duration: 69 minutes (called 6:15 PM, adjourned 7:24 PM)

Attendance

  • Present: Vice-Chair Forges (presiding, elected Chair during the meeting), Member Keller, Member Chacon, Member Galvan, Member Butler, Alternate Member Fernandez
  • Absent: None
  • Staff Present: Development Services Director Lepp; City Attorney Geller; Recording Clerk Justice

Board composition change: Chair Lomneck no longer appears on the roll. Butler, previously Alternate Member, is seated as a full Member; Fernandez appears as Alternate Member for the first time. Board Attorney Johnson, present at every meeting from July 2025 through June 2026, is replaced at the table by City Attorney Geller.

Agenda Items

Annual Elections: Chair and Vice-Chair

  • Type: Officer election
  • Action: Member Keller nominated Vice-Chair Forges as Chair for a term ending June 2027 (seconded by Galvan); carried unanimously. Forges then asked City Attorney Geller whether he could make a motion himself; Geller answered in the affirmative. Forges nominated Member Chacon as Vice-Chair for a term ending June 2027 (seconded by Butler); carried unanimously
  • Vote: Unanimous on both
  • Notable: Terms now run to June 2027 rather than July, moving the officer year off the July election meeting that has anchored it since 2025

Consent: Minutes of the June 9, 2026 Meeting

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

New Business

  • None. No quasi-judicial or legislative items were agendized

Miscellaneous 1: Workshop — Impervious Surface Area Policy Discussion

  • Type: Workshop (no action)
  • Presented by: Development Services Director Lepp
  • Scope: current impervious surface area requirements; data on surrounding municipalities' policies; suggested changes to what Lepp characterized as outdated regulations
  • Proposal on the record: Lepp pondered removing the term "impervious surface" altogether and instead employing the concepts of "lot coverage" and "open space," and discussed a temporary policy recommendation to consider for adoption while the Land Development Code is being updated
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Member Chacon asked whether maintaining the drainage easements along property lines would satisfy the original intent of the current impervious-surface requirements
    • Member Galvan asked about front-yard setbacks and potential front-yard impervious thresholds
    • Member Keller asked whether the suggested changes would affect older subdivisions with retention ponds that were designed to a maximum 50% impervious surface area — the stormwater-capacity question underneath the policy change
    • Chacon raised changes to which material types are counted as impervious surface

Miscellaneous 2: Sunshine Law Training

  • Type: Training (no action)
  • Presented by: City Attorney Geller — ethics, public records, and the Florida Sunshine Act
  • Notable Discussion: Member Keller asked about potential conflicts of interest and abstaining from voting

Miscellaneous 3: Project Status Report

Development Services Director Lepp reported:

  • A sewer project has commenced on N Lakewood Avenue. The project is anticipated to take two years, with work between Mack Street and Wurst Road. During the school year construction is set to occur during school hours, not during drop-off and pick-up times. The sewer installation will eventually extend to Clarcona Ocoee Road
  • A 4,600 sq ft industrial office building is planned along L F Roper Parkway
  • Ocoee Multi-Use Project, at the corner of W McKey Street and S Kissimmee Avenue, is in review with plans for approximately 50 apartments and 10,000 sq ft of retail space
  • Ocoee Commerce Park, on the west side of Ocoee Apopka Road, is in review and will bring about 450,000 sq ft of industrial, retail, and workspace mixed use
  • Vice-Chair Forges asked about the metal building under construction on Bluford Avenue just south of Maine Street; Member Butler commented on crews working near the Ocoee Regional Sports Complex; Member Keller asked about activity at Clarke Road and White Road, which Lepp advised was unrelated to Development Services
  • Forges expressed gratitude for the Chair nomination and said he intends to serve with integrity and respect

Public Hearings Summary

  • Number of speakers: 0 — no quasi-judicial items were heard; no public hearing was opened
  • General sentiment: N/A
  • Key concerns: None recorded

Key Signals

  • A two-year sewer installation has started on N Lakewood Avenue, and it will eventually reach Clarcona Ocoee Road — this is the infrastructure unlock underneath Ocoee's most contested corridor. Construction runs between Mack Street and Wurst Road with school-hour scheduling constraints, and the eventual extension to Clarcona Ocoee Road ties the corridor to the Ocoee Village Center node where the Walmart Neighborhood Market and its fuel station sit. N. Lakewood is already the street that produced the corpus's only 3-1 Ocoee split (1460 N. Lakewood PUD rezoning, March 10, 2026, Keller dissenting) and is designated a future three-lane roadway in the Comprehensive Plan. Sewer availability is the precondition that converts septic-served large lots into subdividable land. Anyone tracking where Ocoee's next annexation-and-rezoning cluster forms should read this line as the schedule: two years of disruption, then capacity.
  • Ocoee's industrial pipeline is now measured in hundreds of thousands of square feet. Ocoee Commerce Park on the west side of Ocoee Apopka Road is in review at roughly 450,000 sq ft of industrial, retail, and workspace mixed use — an order of magnitude above anything in the Ocoee record to date, and it lands on the road Director Lepp flagged a month earlier as carrying "forthcoming" industrial projects. Paired with the 4,600 sq ft L F Roper Parkway office building and the April 2026 Maguire Plaza flex-space approval, the through-line is clear: Ocoee's growth engine has rotated from residential annexation toward employment-and-logistics floorspace on the SR-429 / Ocoee-Apopka Road side of the city.
  • Fifty apartments and 10,000 sq ft of retail are in review at W McKey Street and S Kissimmee Avenue — downtown Ocoee is getting residential density, not just streetscape. The Ocoee Multi-Use Project sits inside the Downtown Mixed-Use District the LDC rewrite has been workshopping since June 2025 (enhanced urban and architectural design standards, faux-façade restrictions, articulation requirements). It will be reviewed against the current code, because the enhanced standards are frozen under SB 180. The gap between what Ocoee is designing for downtown and what it can enforce there is now carrying a live application.
  • The impervious-surface rewrite has advanced from "options for consideration" to a named replacement vocabulary and an interim instrument. In June, Lepp asked the board why 50% is the residential maximum. In July he proposed retiring the term "impervious surface" for "lot coverage" and "open space", brought comparative data from surrounding municipalities, called the current regulations outdated, and floated a temporary policy for adoption while the LDC is being updated. The interim-policy device is the tell: Ocoee cannot amend the code substantially under SB 180, so relief is being routed through a policy instrument instead. Member Keller's question — whether older subdivisions with retention ponds engineered to a 50% assumption can absorb more coverage — is the one that should govern the outcome, and it is unanswered on this record.
  • The board that set Ocoee's zoning posture for the past two years has turned over. Chair Lomneck — who put the board's ISA-consistency doctrine on the record in May 2025, advanced the churches-as-special-exception position in August 2025, and chaired every meeting in the corpus through April 2026 — is gone from the roll. Forges is Chair, Chacon Vice-Chair, Butler elevated from Alternate to Member, Fernandez seated as the new Alternate, and City Attorney Geller has replaced Board Attorney Johnson at the table. Officer terms were also reset from July to June 2027. A near-complete leadership change lands in the same meeting where staff propose rewriting the impervious rule the departing Chair spent two years defending — and one meeting before an item arrives asking the board to approve removing 144 trees.

Raw Notes

Source: Ocoee CivicClerk tenant ocoeefl, P&Z category id=27, agendaId 565 / Events(667). Two published files only: Agenda (fileId 1510) and Agenda Packet (fileId 1511, 13 pages). No standalone Minutes file has been published for this meeting.

The minutes text used here was read from pages 1–3 of the August 11, 2026 agenda packet (agendaId 566, fileId 1543), where the July 14 minutes appear as front matter. They are signed by Recording Clerk Miranda Justice and Lou Forges as Vice-Chair, and sit on the August 11, 2026 consent agenda — not yet approved as of this harvest, hence status: pending-approval.

The July 14 agenda packet itself contains only the agenda, the June 9 minutes, Lepp's impervious-policy presentation title slide, and the July 2026 Development Services "New Development Update" table submitted to the Mayor and City Commission. That table supplies project-level status not repeated in the minutes, including: Traffic Management Solution Office (Sage #2026-0042, 4,606 sq ft modular office, 471 L F Roper Pkwy, 4.86 acres, first review comments sent July 7, 2026); Magnolia Reserve Townhomes (24 of 48 townhomes with CO); Ocoee Crown Point Mixed-Use (16.19 acres, 80% complete, Phase 1 CO 12/23/2025); Aquasonic Car Wash (Clarke Road, 30% complete); Flooring America Storage Building (10897 West Colonial Dr, 10% complete); The Regency (1601 Maguire Road, 300 multifamily + 7,000 sq ft retail, 50% complete, developer using Private Providers); O2B Kids (880 Bluford Avenue, 85% complete); Reserve at Lake Meadows (4 of 46 homes with CO); Wynwood Phases 3 & 4 (121 of 186 homes with CO); Elan Crown Point plat under first review.

The board-composition change is inferred from the roll as minuted, not from a separate appointment record: Lomneck is absent from the "Present" list with "Absent: None" recorded, Butler is listed among Members rather than as Alternate, and Fernandez appears as Alternate Member. The April 14, 2026 status report noted the Recording Clerk would contact members whose terms were up for reappointment. No appointment ordinance or City Commission action is in the P&Z record.

Items count note: this meeting carried no New Business. The two substantive miscellaneous items — the impervious-surface policy workshop and Sunshine Law training — are counted as the meeting's items; the routine project status report is not.

Connected records

2 connected records

Corridors1

Places1