Attorney general questions legality of rural boundaries in Orange, Seminole

This article was originally published by the Orlando Sentinel and made possible through a partnership between Oviedo Community News and the Orlando Sentinel.

The Florida Attorney General’s Office argued in a recent letter that rural boundaries in Seminole and Orange counties are “likely” unconstitutional and violate property owners’ rights, seeming to side with developers who want the protections nullified.

The opinion, issued two days before Thanksgiving, came at the request of Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, who specifically asked about Seminole and Orange counties’ rural boundaries, which limit high-density growth in those areas. He did not ask about Lee County, which he represents and doesn’t have a designated rural boundary.

“The blanket property restrictions on rural landowners in Seminole and Orange counties could very well constitute a regulatory taking under Federal and Florida Constitutions,” General Counsel Greg Slemp said in a Nov. 25 letter responding to Martin’s questions.

Slemp also said the rural boundaries violated the Bert J. Harris Act, a 30-year-old law aimed at protecting property owners from government actions that place an “inordinate burden” on their ability to develop their land.

The letter irritated Lee Constantine, a Seminole County commissioner and former state legislator, who called it part of an ongoing assault on home rule.

“It’s symptomatic of what this legislature and administration are trying to do — take away the power of involved citizens and local governments from governing their own future,” Constantine said.

Seminole’s rural boundary was approved by voters in 2004 and its backers have prevailed in challenges in both state and federal courts.

David Bear, an attorney and president of Save Rural Seminole, said Slemp is “unequivocally wrong” and “misleading” in his arguments. Bear said Slemp’s letter ignores years of legal precedent and case law upholding rural boundaries.

“One of the most glaring indicators that the author is either uninformed or is purposefully choosing to not include relevant information is his failure to make any mention of the fact that there have been three lawsuits pertaining to the validity of Seminole County’s Rural Boundary,” Bear said in a letter to Martin dated the day after Slemp’s opinion was issued.

Slemp’s opinion failed to mention those lawsuits, Bear said.

“It baffles me that an assistant attorney general could be so wildly wrong on these premises which go to the core of the ‘analysis’ he purported to have performed,” Bear said.

Also, for a violation to occur under the Bert Harris Act, the government has to actually take something, Bear said, another fact Slemp fails to mention.

“However, neither Seminole nor Orange’s Rural Boundaries took any rights from the landowners. Neither Rural Boundary changed the land use rights which the owners had at the time they were enacted. Each landowner can still build to the same density they could at the time the Rural Boundaries were enacted.”

Bear said it seems like Slemp was merely providing answers he assumed Martin wanted to hear, and that Martin could be planning to push legislation that would invalidate rural boundaries.

“This follows the blueprint of a legislator who wants to put forth a bill invalidating the rural boundaries,” Bear said.

Martin did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, whose district includes part of the Orange County rural boundary, said he spoke with Martin by phone Monday afternoon and asked why he was “meddling in local issues in my district.”

Martin assured him he was not planning to file legislation to eliminate rural boundaries, Smith said, but had heard from people worried about the impact such regulations.

“Here’s what this means: Developers want to sue again to eliminate these rural boundaries, and were using Martin as a conduit to get a weak legal opinion from the attorney general,” Smith said.

He said the opinion was poorly written and full of hypotheticals. “For the Attorney General to issue this legal opinion without doing a lot of legal research shows the letter is biased and writing toward a conclusion that Senator Martin seems to have wanted.”

This pre-Thanksgiving behind-the-scenes exchange comes as a major case challenging Orange’s rural boundary approved by voters in 2024 plays out in court. The developers of a controversial 2,000-home Sustanee project on over 1,300 acres of cattle land are seeking to nullify the land-use restrictions imposed by the charter amendment.

The owners of the land near Lake Pickett, Rolling R Ranch and Mary Rybolt Lamar, have been trying for a decade to win county approval for their project.

The basis for their claim is Senate Bill 180, which was intended to streamline the approval process for rebuilding communities hit hard by hurricanes, but has been more broadly interpreted as a preemption against  local zoning ordinances that restrict high density growth.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law on June 26.

The suit was filed in August, after Orange County commissioners rejected lawyers’ demands that the rural boundary be rescinded and after the DeSantis administration gave a similarly sweeping interpretation of the law that backed up the lawsuit’s claims.

The law applies to Orange County because the county was listed within the federal disaster declaration for Hurricane Milton. Environmentalists and local elected officials have raised alarms about the new law, and the DeSantis administration’s interpretation of it, saying it has the potential to trigger massive urban sprawl and eliminate critical rural areas.

The rural boundary approved by 70% of Orange County voters in 2024 makes it harder to increase development density or intensity in rural areas by requiring more than a simple majority vote.

Seminole’s rural boundary was first approved with 56% of voters favoring it. It required three of five commissioners to take land out of the rural boundary, but in 2024 residents voted to make it tougher to remove land from the boundary by requiring a super-majority vote of four out of five commissioners.

That rural boundary thwarted former State Rep. Chris Dorworth’s plans to turn 700 acres of pastureland into the River Cross megadevelopment with up to 520 single-family homes, 270 townhouses and 500 apartments as well as 1.5 million square feet of shops, restaurants and office space. He filed several lawsuits to get the decision overturned and lost each one, with the outcome further strengthening the legality of the rural boundaries, Bear said.

Dorworth was the first person in Seminole to receive a copy of the opinion, Bear said, “and he gave it to multiple Seminole County elected officials.”

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