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Meetings · Tavares

Tavares Planning and Zoning Advisory Board — February 20, 2025 minutes

City of Tavares Planning and Zoning Advisory Board — February 20, 2025

Meeting Overview

Type: Regular Meeting Quorum: Yes (5 of 7 members present) Duration: 3:05 PM – 4:00 PM (55 minutes) Location: Tavares Council Chambers, 201 E. Main Street

Attendance

  • Present: Gary Santoro (Chairman), Deborah Murphy (Vice-Chairman), Bruce Peterman, Brooke Matthews, Dara Treadwell
  • Absent: Dian Joy, James Sweezea
  • Staff Present: Antonio Fabre (Community Development Director), Anarquis Frias (City Planner), Lindsay Holt (City Attorney), Erick Hernandez (Staff Assistant)

Prior minutes: two sets approved at this meeting — May 16, 2024 (approved as amended, moved Matthews, seconded Peterman, 5-0) and October 17, 2024 (approved, moved Murphy, seconded Treadwell, 5-0).

Agenda Items

Item 1: Approval of the May 16, 2024, Planning & Zoning Board Meeting Minutes

  • Type: Other (administrative)
  • Request: Approve the May 16, 2024 minutes
  • Action: Approved as amended
  • Vote: 5-0 (moved Matthews, seconded Peterman)
  • Notable Discussion: Treadwell submitted three corrections — page 4 "compatible" to "comparable"; page 6 "he" to "she"; page 7 "8PM" to "6PM".

Item 2: Approval of the October 17, 2024, Planning & Zoning Board Meeting Minutes

  • Type: Other (administrative)
  • Request: Approve the October 17, 2024 minutes
  • Action: Approved
  • Vote: 5-0 (moved Murphy, seconded Treadwell)
  • Notable Discussion: No corrections offered.

Item 3: Remarks from the Chairperson

  • Type: Other
  • Request: Chairman's remarks
  • Action: No action (discussion only)
  • Notable Discussion: Santoro stated that when there are no items before the Board, an informational meeting will occasionally be held, and reminded members that the Planning & Zoning Board is an advisory board. He announced the election of Chairperson would be held at the following meeting and asked members to notify Mr. Fabre of their attendance.

Item 4: Informational Tools for Permitting, Zoning & Land Use Inquiries

  • Type: Other (staff presentation)
  • Applicant: City of Tavares Community Development
  • Request: Staff orientation on department resources and upcoming board business
  • Action: No action (presentation)
  • Notable Discussion: Fabre's presentation named the Board's upcoming presentation queue: Metropolitan Traffic Initiatives, SR 19 Widening Update, Tavares-to-Mount Dora Trail update, Consumption Use Permit status, YMCA and other City parks update, and the Strategic Growth Plan. He also walked the Community Development website's permitting, land use, and zoning sections and the hearing-notice process. No comments from the Board.

Item 5: Intro to GIS (Geographic Information System)

  • Type: Other (staff presentation)
  • Applicant: City of Tavares Community Development
  • Request: Orientation on Lake County Property Appraiser and Clerk of the Circuit Court records tools
  • Action: No action (presentation)
  • Notable Discussion:
    • Frias demonstrated the Property Record Card, alternate key, map search, and book-and-page lookup on the Lake County Property Appraiser site, and record search on the Clerk of the Circuit Court site.
    • Peterman asked who oversees the Property Appraiser website; Frias said the Property Appraiser does.
    • Santoro raised narrow roads and asked Attorney Holt whether county-owned roads can influence the Board's decision-making. Holt said capacity and concurrency aspects pertain to streets, that affected county roads require collaboration with the County on level of service, and that the County maintains an "Order of Priority" list of roads with their conditions.
    • Treadwell asked what "staff recommendation" means in a staff report; Fabre explained the process.

Public Hearings Summary

No public hearings were scheduled. The agenda's Public Hearings section was empty and Attorney Holt stated the hearing was informational only with no need to swear anyone in. No members of the public spoke under Audience to be Heard.

Key Signals

  • Tavares runs a genuinely advisory P&Z board that holds informational meetings when it has no applications. Santoro said it on the record: when nothing is before the Board, an informational meeting is convened instead. February 2025 was one of those — five agenda items, zero land-use decisions, two presentations on how to look up a parcel. For anyone tracking Tavares, the practical consequence is that a P&Z meeting appearing on the calendar does not imply a development decision is pending; the agenda has to be read.

  • The Board cleared a nine-month minutes backlog in a single sitting. May 16, 2024 and October 17, 2024 minutes were both approved on February 20, 2025. A board that ratifies minutes from three quarters earlier is a board that has not been meeting on a monthly cadence — the paper trail confirms the meeting rhythm is intermittent, not the third-Thursday regularity the schedule implies.

  • Staff pre-announced the 2025 pipeline, and it was infrastructure, not subdivisions. Fabre's list — SR 19 widening, the Tavares-to-Mount Dora Trail, metropolitan traffic initiatives, the Strategic Growth Plan — is the agenda the Board actually spent 2025 on. A homebuyer reading Tavares in early 2025 should have been watching road capacity and trail corridors, not rezonings.

  • The chair went looking for the county-road constraint before any application arrived. Santoro's question about narrow roads and Holt's answer — capacity and concurrency, coordination with Lake County, the County's "Order of Priority" road list — establish the frame the Board would later apply. This is the seed of the traffic-capacity skepticism that shows up in Tavares P&Z discussions through 2025 and 2026.

  • Attendance was already thin, and the chair was already counting. Two of seven members absent, and Santoro asked members to notify staff of their attendance in advance. Two meetings later the Board voted to declare a seat vacant for absenteeism. February is where the record of that problem starts.

Raw Notes

  • Source: February 20, 2025 minutes PDF, CivicClerk file ID 1625, published on event 442 (agendaId 360). Agenda is file ID 1442; a web agenda packet is file ID 1447.
  • Source discrepancy: the adjournment motion is recorded as carrying "unanimously 6-0" while the attendance block lists five members present and the two earlier motions carried 5-0. The 6-0 tally appears to be a clerical error in the source document.
  • Attorney Lindsay Holt served as City Attorney at this meeting; Amanda Boggus appears in that role at the March and April 2025 meetings. Both attorneys recur through the coverage period.
  • Board member roster as of February 2025: Santoro (Chairman), Murphy (Vice-Chairman), Joy, Peterman, Matthews, Sweezea, Treadwell — seven seats.
  • Minutes attested by Jillian Roberts, Deputy City Clerk.
  • The election of officers referenced by Santoro was held the following month (March 20, 2025), not in January as the Board's own practice nominally requires.

Connected records

1 connected record

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