After almost three hours of debate on issues ranging from the slow movement of water through wetlands to the limits of Orange County’s cash reserves, commissioners voted 4-3 to approve a modified version of Tuscana, a huge mixed-use development planned near Shingle Creek with apartments, hotels and commercial space.
Read more Orange County tightens rules for e-bikes, other micromobility devices
A version of the project, proposed by Geyer Development LLC and Shingle Creek Co-Owners LLC, entities associated with Israeli developer Zari Kovo, had been unanimously rejected by the board last year. But the county’s worries about the legal costs of refusing turned the tide in Tuesday’s meeting, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings led the new majority. The reversal came 16 months after commissioners denied the project in May 2025 amid concerns that building thousands of apartments and hotel rooms on the 227-acre property would destroy wetlands and potentially worsen flooding downstream in the Shingle Creek basin.
The 2025 plan would have directly affected more than 22 acres of wetlands; modifications, including some in the meeting, have trimmed that but it was not immediately clear by how much.
What brought Tuscana back was a state property-rights process that unfolded after that rejection.
Within a month of the 2025 vote, the owners filed for relief under Florida’s Land Use and Environmental Dispute Resolution Act. After three unsuccessful attempts at mediation, the county and developers agreed on a two-day hearing before special magistrate Igmedio Pantaleon earlier this summer.
Pantaleon concluded Sept. 3 that the county’s denial was unreasonable and unfairly burdened the owners’ use of the property, and he recommended that commissioners reconsider and approve it with additional protections. Under the law, the board then had to return to the matter and decide whether to accept, modify or reject his recommendation.
Pantaleon’s recommendation did not reduce the proposed 4,814 apartments, 1,291 hotel rooms or 653,400 square feet of commercial space. It called for a 25-foot buffer beside wetlands, mitigation for indirect effects in an additional 50-foot area and more detailed floodplain and stormwater studies before a later development plan is approved. By Tuesday’s meeting, the developers had agreed to elevate 300 feet of each of the two access roads over northern wetlands, at an estimated cost of $7 million.
But a few county commissioners continued to balk.
For long stretches Tuesday, Commissioner Nicole Wilson, an attorney, drove the commission’s questioning, moving methodically through the magistrate process, the evidence Pantaleon considered and the county’s earlier environmental findings. Demings twice interrupted Wilson’s extended remarks in an effort to rein them in.
More than an hour later, as the discussion moved toward a vote, Demings returned to Wilson for another round of questions.
Wilson’s largest concern was that the financial risk of rejecting Tuscana was being weighed against an incomplete measure of the cost of approving it. She argued that existing stormwater standards may not adequately account for the flooding Central Florida is experiencing and that further loss of wetland storage and flow capacity in Shingle Creek could leave residents and government paying for greater flood damage later.
Read more Experts: Florida ‘moving backwards’ on teaching evolution, climate change in public schools
Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad pressed the flooding argument more forcefully. She repeatedly called it a safety issue, argued that a future land-use designation did not guarantee a developer the maximum density allowed by that designation, and said the county should be prepared to defend its 2025 decision in court.
By this point, the commission’s debate had divided into two kinds of risk: the environmental and public cost of building along wetlands, and the financial cost of refusing.
The property owners’ appraiser valued about 150 developable acres at $800,000 an acre with the Tuscana approvals and $20,000 an acre without them, producing a claimed loss of roughly $115 million. Assistant County Attorney Lee Bernbaum cautioned that Orange County would hire its own appraiser if litigation followed and could reach a different valuation. But he also warned commissioners not to assume the county’s number would fall to a negligible amount.
Orange County would have no insurance coverage for that liability. County Administrator Byron Brooks told commissioners that such a judgment would have to be paid from the general fund or other available revenues and could wipe out the county’s reserve for fiscal 2027. That argument weighed heavily on the commissioners who ultimately changed course.
Mayra Uribe said the same dollars support housing, social services, environmental programs and other county obligations. She raised scenarios in which a loss, accumulated interest and legal expenses could climb far beyond the owners’ initial appraisal, although county attorneys did not put a likely figure on the final exposure.
Mike Crabb said he wished the property were being proposed for something far less intensive, but he was unwilling to place taxpayers at risk for a potential judgment he believed would be substantial.
Mike Scott approached the question more cautiously. He acknowledged the county’s responsibility to protect homes and waterways and recalled the severe flooding suffered by Orlo Vista residents, then asked lawyers and administrators where the money would come from if Orange County fought and lost. The answer brought the debate back to the same place: county funds.
Semrad was unshaken.
“Let’s go to court. Let’s go,” she urged her colleagues.
In the end, Demings and commissioners Uribe, Crabb and Scott backed the modified plan. Commissioners Wilson, Maribel Gomez Cordero and Semrad opposed it. The vote gives the developers a land-use plan and conservation-area impact permit subject to the new conditions, but detailed engineering, drainage calculations and other development reviews remain ahead.
Have a tip about Central Florida development? Contact me at [email protected] or (407) 420-5246. Follow GrowthSpotter on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Read more Spooky Awards 2026: Submit your spooktacular Halloween home