A property north of Oviedo long known as the old Pappy’s Patch, a popular strawberry-picking farm, has been protected from development as part of Seminole County’s development-restricted rural boundary — but one of the area’s most prominent builders wants to change that.
Read more Mother of 2-year-old fatally shot in Kissimmee could be charged with negligence
Developer Chris Dorworth has submitted a new request with the county under his group Strawberry Lane LLC to carve out the 67-acre site from the protected area to allow him to move forward with a community of up to 136 single-family homes.
Dorworth is not just any developer — he’s a well-connected former state legislator who has been doing battle with Seminole County over rural growth restrictions for years, most notoriously with his long planned, now defunct River Cross proposal east of the Econlockhatchee River. His efforts have helped stoke wider objections to rural boundary rules among state Republican politicians.
But Dorworth acknowledges he faces an uphill battle with his latest proposal.
“The applicant files this petition with the candid recognition that the board … .has rendered the practical likelihood of approval functionally zero,” Dorworth said in his application.
Four out of five county commissioners would have to agree to remove the property out of the rural boundary, an area that covers nearly one third of Seminole’s east side where development is restricted to one home per five acres or one home per 10 acres. The proposed development would have a density of slightly more than two homes per acre.
In 2024, 82% of Seminole voters approved a ballot referendum that would require a supermajority vote by county commissioners to remove property from the rural area. And each commissioner has publicly supported protecting the rural boundary.
“The county has arranged matters so that it is the only government on earth that can act on this property,” Dorworth said.
For years, Pappy’s Patch was a popular organic strawberry farm where the public could pick fruit during the harvesting season. It closed in 2019 after the owners retired.
The site is northeast of Florida Avenue and DeLeon Street and just south of Lake Jesup in the Black Hammock area of the county.
County commissioners and staff would not comment on the application.
A Seminole spokesman said Friday the application would have to be reviewed and a recommendation issued by the county’s planning and zoning board before it’s voted on by county commissioners at a public hearing. That likely would not happen until after August.
This latest request comes five years after Dorworth submitted a similar application in August 2021 to remove the land from the boundary to eventually develop a pair of “world class master planned” residential communities.
Both requests point out that Seminole had allowed in 2006 and 2013 the removal of two separate parcels from the rural boundary adjacent to Pappy’s Patch, paving the way for the development of Southern Oaks with 54 homes and Preserve at Black Hammock with 73 houses. Each of those have a density of about 2 homes per acre.
“The applicant is not asking for something new,” according to Dorworth’s current application. “The applicant is asking for the same thing the neighbors already have.”
But David Bear, president of Save Rural Seminole, a non-profit which strives to protect the rural boundary, called that argument “completely immaterial.”
If Strawberry Lane succeeds in developing a residential community, adjacent landowners could then make the same argument, until the entire rural boundary is paved over to Brevard County, he said.
Read more Who’s raising the most money? Search congressional fundraising data for Central Florida candidates
“I just find this claim to be completely spurious,” Bear said. “If you follow Dorworth’s test, then there is no end to the sprawling subdivisions.”
Dorworth’s application comes as the Oviedo Council on Monday is scheduled to decide whether to place a referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot to ask city voters whether it should require four affirmative votes from the five-member council to annex property within the rural boundary, instead of just a 3-member majority.
If property is annexed into adjacent Oviedo, it would still face the same development restrictions in the city unless it were removed from the county’s rural boundary.
But because the property lacks sewer lines, Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said the city would have to build “an entirely new sewer plant” to accommodate that many new houses outside its current service area.
“It’s just not feasible for us to expand,” Sladek said. “This is an issue of long-term fiscal sustainability for the residents of Oviedo. Our utilities cannot handle serving this property.”
Sladek pointed out the property sits in the environmentally-sensitive Black Hammock area just east of Sweetwater Creek, which flows into Lake Jesup.
“That could be environmentally problematic” if a residential development relied on septic tanks instead of sewer lines, she said.
In his application, Dorworth also cites a recent opinion by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier that rural boundaries are unconstitutional because they deprive developers wanting to get the most of their land holdings.
During this year’s legislative session, Republican state Sen. Jason Brodeur — whose district includes Seminole’s rural boundary and is a longtime friend of Dorworth — backed an amendment slipped into a land-use bill that would’ve allowed property owners within or adjacent to rural boundaries, including Seminole’s, to seek compensation if the county didn’t give them permission to remove the boundary’s development restrictions.
The proposal failed in the state Senate, but it’s likely to return to the 2027 legislative session.
Dorworth also cites Florida’s Bert Harris Act, a 1995 law that allows private property owners to seek compensation when government restrictions limit the use or value of their property.
In addition, Dorworth said if his application is denied, he will “deliver the pre-suit notice” to the county and treat it as a violation of the Bert Harris Act and the “Takings Clause” of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, in which a government’s land use regulations become so restrictive that they effectively deprive an owner of any economic use of their property.
”One purpose of this petition is to preserve the formal record on which subsequent proceedings will rest,” Dorworth said.
Read more Poll finds wording of Florida property tax amendment could set its fate