Winter Garden braces for growth explosion

One expert says the city needs to ramp up services to support a population that will double in 15 years.

Sandra MathersSentinel Staff Writer, November 13, 2005, Orlando Sentinel

WINTER GARDEN -- It took Linda and John Morris three years to find their perfect piece of paradise. It took another year to build on it.

The Morrises moved into their four-bedroom home in Fuller's Landing two months ago -- part of a housing boom expected to double the city's population within 15 years.

"We're as happy as pigs in slop," quips Linda Morris, who operates a concrete-pumping business with her husband. "We wanted a two-story with a two-car garage, and we didn't want to [be able] to spit into our neighbor's home."

Fuller's Landing, a development of 61 homes by Maronda Homes on spacious lots, fits the family's description of "home."

The Morrises aren't the only folks looking to move into "quiet and quaint" Winter Garden.

Every builder in America, it seems, is throwing up concrete blocks on as many lakes as they can find in one of Orange County's last rural outposts.

Nearly 20 home builders and several local corporations have more than three dozen subdivisions in development. They are expected to yield 6,700 single-family homes and town homes at prices ranging from $280,000 to more than $500,000.

Those homes translate to 16,700 new residents for a city that already boasts 25,000 people -- a population jump of 67 percent.

And that's not all.

Winter Garden -- the fastest growing city in Orange -- is working with the county to annex another large tract of mostly undeveloped land from the city's western boundary south of Florida's Turnpike to the Lake County line.

Known as the Hartwood Marsh area, the pristine tract lies in the county between John's Lake and Lake Avalon.

It contains 1,300 developable acres that could add 3,600 homes and 9,800 residents to the subdivisions already in the works. That would more than double Winter Garden's population during the next 10 to 15 years, according to a 2002 planning study authorized by the McKinnon Corp., the majority property owner.

"It's definitely a flood [of people]," said Joyce Levine, assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale. "It's an awful lot of growth for a city this size."

But Levine said the issue is: Does the city have the resources to pay for the infrastructure upgrades needed to support all the growth? "The city has to ramp up services . . . more streets, police and firemen," she said. "Their new [property] tax base doesn't come in right away, so communities are always behind in doing things they need to do."

Officials weigh in

City officials, however, say they have all their growth bases covered. But one county commissioner says she isn't so sure.

Winter Garden City Manager Mike Bollhoefer said impact fees and property taxes will be adequate to fund the city's infrastructure needs, bolstered by a "good" city reserve fund of $9 million.

A new City Hall is planned, and a third fire station south of State Road 50 could eventually be built on land donated by M/I Homes, the developer of Stone Crest, Bollhoefer said.

Winter Garden, which has its own water plant and wells, is planning a bigger sewage-treatment plant. And the city has just renewed its water permit from the St. Johns Water Management District that will provide enough drinking and irrigation water to serve 35,000 people in 2013.

If the population increases to that level in less than eight years, the city can apply for a permit amendment as long as certain conditions are met, St. Johns officials said.

Still, there's an ominous caveat.

"We have a water plan that shows not enough groundwater for all the needs [in the 18-county district] in 2025," said James Hollingshead, a St. Johns hydrologist. "We've been telling people that for five years."

Improving roads

Another thorny problem for the city is finding adequate parkland in south Winter Garden, which has no parks.

But the biggest quandary in west Orange is how to pay for multimillion-dollar road improvements needed to support all the growth on the area's county and state roads.

The portion of S.R. 50 that runs through Winter Garden and Ocoee, for instance, isn't included in the state's five-year improvement plan, Bollhoefer said. It needs to be widened from four to six lanes to accommodate all the growth.

The cost of widening S.R. 50 is still $26 million short, Bollhoefer said.

Homes aren't the only source of clogged roads in west Orange. The downsized -- but still huge -- 1.15 million-square-foot shopping center known as Winter Garden Village at Fowler Groves will bring hundreds of outsiders to the south end of the city, where development is the heaviest, when it opens in July 2007.

"We're not keeping pace with demand," said Orange County Commissioner Teresa Jacobs, who has adopted traffic as one of her key issues.

She said the state has given County Road 535 -- also known as Winter Garden-Vineland Road -- a failing grade because traffic already exceeds its design capacity.

The north-south road, one of just two main arteries serving Winter Garden south of S.R. 50, will be redirected to cut through Fowler Groves as a six-lane extension of Daniels Road before the center is built. That extension is being paid for by the center's developer, The Sembler Co. of St. Petersburg, Bollhoefer said.

But the county has no plans to widen Winter Garden-Vineland, the current C.R. 535, which will remain a two-lane road hugging the shopping center, Jacobs said.

Residents of numerous subdivisions on the road across from Fowler Groves who lobbied to downsize the shopping center say traffic already is a rush-hour nightmare. More traffic will make northbound left turns impossible, they said.

Jacobs sees only two options for crowded county roads: Slow down growth when there's no gas-tax money to improve them, or shift the cost of improving them to developers.

"No one's challenging them," Jacobs said of developers. "There's no watchdog."