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What's on his desk? The future of booming Osceola County
Jeff Jones' job is to shape 'smart growth.' Skeptics say that may not be so simple.
Daphne Sashin | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 5, 2007
KISSIMMEE -- The man shaping Metro Orlando's next frontier is someone most people never see.
Jeff Jones operates in a universe of comprehensive plans and future land-use maps, growth boundaries and land-development codes. When he's not reviewing documents or holding conference calls with regulators from his sparsely decorated office, you might find him in a conference room negotiating with developers' consultants.
Very quietly, behind the scenes, Osceola County's first "smart-growth coordinator" is guiding development strategy as it shifts from a mostly rural setting to a more urban metropolis while trying to protect the qualities that make people want to live there.
While the county's planning staff focuses on the details of new subdivisions and shopping centers, Jones serves to remind the county that its bigger vision for handling the next half-century of growth is more than a planning document on a shelf.
"Is it impossible?" said Jones, who has been on the job since May. "I don't know, but if we can succeed in actually implementing a new vision on the ground, Osceola County is one of the places where it has a chance of happening."
Developers, conservationists and state officials have applauded Osceola's decision to recruit Jones, who spent most of his career championing big-picture thinking at the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council.
But skeptics question whether Osceola can buck the region's appetite for low-density, land-gobbling development.
Alan Malatesta, a former conservation chairman of the Kissimmee Valley Audubon Society and critic of Osceola's past development decisions, has likened Jones' appointment to "painting a big happy face on a runaway locomotive."
Between now and 2025, Osceola is expected to more than double in population, from 235,000 people to 525,000. Based on the number of large-scale projects in the pipeline, nearly 40 percent of Central Florida's housing growth is projected to take place in Osceola.
The region's economy depends on it, experts from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute told county officials last year. As the supply of available land dwindles along the Interstate 4 corridor, an increasing share of housing construction likely will take place in Lake and Osceola counties, home to the most land available for development within commuting distance of Orlando.
Jones has spent most of the past six months tweaking Osceola's comprehensive growth plan to show the state Department of Community Affairs that the county has adequate controls to corral the population explosion in a way that doesn't trash the environment, further clog the highways or make current taxpayers foot the bill.
The plan seeks to contain the population growth in the top third of the county, filling in the spaces around Kissimmee and St. Cloud and upping the average density of neighborhoods from about one home per acre to three or more per acre. Beyond that so-called urban-growth boundary, densities would be limited to one home per five or more acres -- creating a clear separation of urban and rural areas.
Jones acknowledges this future will be difficult to swallow for the people who moved to 5-acre lots on the fringes of Kissimmee and St. Cloud and don't want to give up their semirural surroundings.
"You can't support these low densities. You don't have enough money to pay for the facilities and services to make it work," Jones said. "It's a tough situation for the county to be in, trying to accommodate that growth in a way that makes sense environmentally and makes sense financially, while being in tune to the residents' desires."
Within the urban area, Jones will work with developers of large properties to plan communities with stores, parks, bike trails and employment centers close by, in contrast to the modern suburban model of single-family homes far from anything else.
"That's not to say that everybody is going to start walking to Home Depot and lugging two-by-fours on their shoulders," Jones said. But at least people wouldn't have to get on the highway just to make a trip to the drugstore.
Looking ahead, Jones is helping the county design a second urban area 50 miles south of Kissimmee and St. Cloud. In the next six to eight months, he will work with large landowners around Yeehaw Junction to design a "rural land stewardship" program that would allow high-density clusters surrounded by large expanses of environmentally sensitive and agricultural land.
It won't be easy to translate the county's vision into reality, but Osceola has a number of factors working in its favor, Jones said.
The county already has a relatively compact urban area, centered in two incorporated cities, Kissimmee and St. Cloud. That makes it easier for policymakers to draw a boundary for future growth.
"If you think of Lake County, with 14 cities spread throughout the county, how would the county ever go about developing a similar strategy? It's just not possible," Jones said. "Their interests are not always the same, and it's when those interests collide that you find something like an urban-growth strategy beginning to fail."
Unlike in other counties, where rural areas are seen as holding areas for future development, Osceola still has a number of ranchers in the middle and southern parts of the county who are committed to staying in agriculture.
"You have an interest on the part of rural landowners to contain growth within a certain part of the county -- another huge plus," Jones said.
Lastly, the majority of the new developments in Osceola are being designed by a relatively small number of planning consultants who live in the community and have an interest in its future, Jones said.
"Over time, they've come to realize that they're just not here to make money," Jones said. "They're businessmen, but they have larger interests, and one of them is to build communities."
Daphne Sashin can be reached at or 407-931-5944 .
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