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‘It isn’t working:’ Osceola taxpayers frustrated with NeoCity’s progress 10 years later

Planned high-tech hub is making progress — but very slowly

KISSIMMEE, Fla. – Osceola County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, and one development that’s poised to attract even more newcomers to the area is NeoCity.

The nearly 500-acre campus along U.S. 192 in Kissimmee is expected to become a high-tech hub in the field of advanced manufacturing but a decade after the project was put into motion this field of dreams is hardly realized.

“When the county entered into this, they said, ‘If you build it, it will come,’” said Don Fisher, Osceola County’s Manager. “I wish I understood better how slow that would actually be.”

Fisher has been involved in the NeoCity plan since the beginning. He said the project’s main goal is to diversify the economy and bring thousands of high-paying jobs to a county that’s heavily reliant on tourism and agriculture.

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“When (COVID-19) hit, we hit 30% unemployment, which was the third highest in the United States,” he explained. “That kind of affirmed our actions here.”

Fisher said Osceola County has invested more than $300 million taxpayer dollars into NeoCity. It’s also received half a billion dollars in federal funding in the past 20 months — a sign momentum has been building for the up-and-coming master-planned community that will eventually produce products that help enable autonomous vehicles, supercomputing and more.

“We’ve got something that most don’t,” Fisher said. “Not only is it pad ready, but the county also owns this property with no debt. It allows us to enter into economic development deals that others cannot. Others have to charge, generally, full real estate value for this. Our motive is creating the jobs – jobs per acre.”

Around 140 direct jobs have been created so far at NeoCity, according to Fisher. He said SkyWater Technology – the only U.S.-owned and U.S.-based pure play semiconductor foundry – is expected to hire 225 employees itself. The Minnesota-based company has an agreement with Osceola County that runs through October 2044.

“It’s certainly our most important economic development project,” Fisher said. “We’re not doing this to be the in the semiconductor industry; we’re doing this to grow high-tech jobs for our community.”

NeoCity development aimed at attracting more tech companies to Osceola County (Copyright 2021 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.)

Nelle Hernandez and Jeremy Fetzer are with Osceola Action Committee – an organization formed a few years ago to fight the rapid growth in the county. The two longtime Osceola County residents told News 6 they’re frustrated with the lack of progress at NeoCity considering how much of their tax dollars have been spent.

“That’s a lot of money, but not a lot of jobs,” Hernandez said. “It’s not justifiable. Right now, it’s just a money pit. It’s a tax dollars money pit.”

“I would say it’s failing, but I caveat that taxpayers have too much invested for it to fail,” Fetzer added. “It can’t fail. We’re $350 million into this project. It’s been in inception since 2014. Whether it’s local, state or federal taxes, this project has been fully funded by taxpayers, so to allow this to fail would be detrimental to our economy.”

One of the original partners at NeoCity was UCF, which was poised to be an anchor tenant at the technology park. In 2021, though, the school pulled out of the project and SkyWater took its place.

“Honestly, what UCF did was what all of Osceola County taxpayers have done,” Fetzer explained. “We’ve peeled back enough of the onion to say, ‘This isn’t working.’”

Fisher admits getting the message across to residents about the value of NeoCity has been one of the more challenging parts of the process and offered the timeline of Lake Nona’s Medical City as an example of how projects like this take years – if not decades – to come to fruition.

“We’re very similar to, but not as big as, Medical City,” he said. “If you look at it from the perspective that we’ve only been up and running from 2021 when SkyWater came in, we’ve received $500 million worth of grants, and the state has been very supportive of this as well. My view of it is that we’re in a four-year run not a ten-year run.”

One of the three buildings at NeoCity is NeoCity Academy – the No. 1 public high school in Osceola County. The 500-student magnet school, which is currently undergoing an expansion due to its success, also cracks U.S. News and World Report’s top 100 high schools in the nation.

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