EDGEWATER DRIVE VISION TASK FORCE DRAFT RECOMMENDATIONS

On Tuesday November 18th the Edgewater Drive Vision Task Force held a public meeting at the College Park Baptist Church, all of their meetings have been open to the public. The purpose of this meeting was to present the Task Force's recommendation to the College Park Community before formally submitting them to the City of Orlando.

The information that was presented was in keeping with the history and traditions of Edgewater Drive and was true to the consensus of what College Park residents want to see along the business corridor. City staff will now take these broad principles and develop a plan.

While the Task Force and the City's planning department have done a lot of good work in the past year I was really expecting a plan to be presented at the meeting Tuesday night and not just broad policy statements. My concern is that the actual plan will deviate from what the citizen's of College Park want.

In particularly I am concerned with the section on Urban Form. While the document makes clear that there will be no zoning changes on or along Edgewater Drive, when I questioned how they would implement the stated policy without zoning, it eventually came out that the existing Special Plan would be extended and modified. The new special plan would use a planning tool called "transects" to limit height, and massing. But now I am starting to get into gibberish myself.

Here is the bottom line. There is a lot of good stuff in the final recommendations but until we see the actual plan we will not know what we have. The wording in the Urban Form section of the document is broad enough to build a seven story building on an R-1 lot, riding in on a "tansect".

I urged the Task Force to bring the actual plan back to the community before moving forward with Municipal Planning Board approval. Claramargaret Groover, Task Force Chair, was reluctant to do that.

The meeting ended with Commissioner Robert Stuart dis banning the Task Force and thanking them for their work. He asserted that any and all further work on the recommendations and the plan were a the sole discretion of the Commissioner.

So stay tuned not sure what we have yet. The City has a spot on their website for Edgewater Drive Vision Task Force , when I checked a few minutes ago the final report was not yet posted but it should be soon.