ORLANDO, Fla. – As WKMG Hits the Road in the 32825 zip code of east Orange County, neighbors told us they were curious about new developments coming to the area.
The community is pretty built out with a lot of single-family homes, but sandwiched between some subdivisions, News 6 found a vacant lot with a billboard that features a rendering of a new development.
Dozens of cows currently graze the 40-acre property along Lake Underhill Road. Jennifer Scheu lives in the Fieldstream West subdivision across the street.
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“Everybody loves the cows,” Scheu said. “It’s nice to see them out there. Something that’s kind of wild in the middle of the city.”
They’re an uncommon sight in the middle of suburbia, but there’s a reason the land has stayed undeveloped. News 6 found out it was once a landfill, and there’s still trash buried underneath.
Vic Lovell lives in the Fieldstream North neighborhood right next door.
“You can’t even put so much as an asphalt parking lot on that land without digging it up and putting soil where it ought to be,” Lovell said. “You can’t build on an old refrigerator.”
Orange County also says there’s trash buried under an elevated portion of Lake Underhill Road in front of the property. Crews had to build it that way in the 1980s to separate the road from any trash that may remain.
One developer, though, was up for the difficult and costly task of clearing the old landfill and bringing new life to the site.
Mike Wright with MMI Development wanted to build a mixed-use community called Fieldstream Village, featuring shops, restaurants and 1,500 apartment units.
The plan also included widening Lake Underhill Road to four lanes between Dean Road and Rouse Road, a solution neighbors have been waiting to see for more than a decade.
“The county does not want to pull the trigger on any expansion of this street because there’s garbage under it,” Lovell said. “They would have to do it a special way, and it would be very, very costly.”
When Wright took his ambitious idea to Orange County commissioners in November of 2022, he was hoping the county would agree to pay its share to clean out the closed landfill, which it used in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I think these people deserve a good road that has traffic devices, that’s number one,” Wright told commissioners. “Number two, I think they deserve not to live next door to a dump.”
Wright asked commissioners to create a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) agreement. Essentially, he proposed to pay the tens of millions of dollars it would’ve taken to remove the waste up front and recoup the money over the next 20 or 30 years by keeping taxes fixed as the property’s value went up.
Commissioners were hesitant to back the unique financing plan and directed Wright to come up with a different way to pay for the landfill excavation. Nothing has been submitted since the 2022 meeting.
“It’s just very unfortunate because I don’t believe we’ll see progress in this area in my lifetime,” Lovell said.
Wright told News 6 Fieldstream Village has been on the back burner as he’s pursued other developments that aren’t as complex. He said he might revisit the project, though, after News 6 showed interest in the property.