Oviedo Charter amendment for added rural boundary protection heads to November ballot

Oviedo residents will have the opportunity to vote on an additional charter amendment in the November elections — this one to potentially increase protections for the rural boundary that borders the city’s eastern side.

Following a public hearing where multiple people spoke in favor of passage at the City Council’s July 20 meeting, the amendment passed a Council vote of 3-2, with Jeff Boddiford and Keith Britton voting against.

The amendment, which will join four others on the ballot, would require a supermajority Council vote — a 4-1 vote in its current form — for the approval of any ordinance annexing land lying within the Seminole County Charter’s rural area as of July 4, 2026.

“It’s too soon,” Britton said of adding the amendment to the November ballot. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s good timing. I want to be able to negotiate, a hard negotiation, if and when the county decides that we need to annex some of this stuff in, and I don’t want to have to go through the hoops of a supermajority to do it.”

Boddiford said that while he doesn’t have an issue with rural boundary protections, and “it’s a great idea,” the amendment requiring a supermajority could handcuff future City Councils. 

“You’re not knowing what may be at stake there [in the future],” he said.

If approved in November, it would come two years after Seminole County voters overwhelmingly voted for similar amendments to the County’s charter. The 2024 amendments require the same supermajority from the Board of County Commissioners to sell off or change usage of natural lands owned by taxpayers, or to move the lines and remove lands from the rural area. Both passed with more than 82% of the vote.

Local developer Chris Dorworth has submitted an application to the county to have the 67-acre Pappy’s Patch property, a former U-pick strawberries family farm in Oviedo, removed from inside the rural boundary lines.

“This is not a proposal that stops growth, it’s not a proposal that stops any annexation from the rural boundary; it makes it so that if the circumstance comes up, or that’s something that [Council is] considering, you’re really certain about it,” David Bear, president of Save Rural Seminole, said at the meeting. “This is a super, super, super majority issue [with] 82%, 84% on the two countywide referendums. That’s real consensus, as much as anybody, any issue in today’s society gets.”

While news of Dorworth’s application coincided with the July 6 Oviedo City Council meeting where they advanced the proposal to the July 20 public hearing, council members said the timing was a coincidence and they did not know about it prior to the meeting.

Former Council member and current member of the city’s Charter Review Committee Stephen Schenck said at the meeting that the CRC sent four other amendments to council “because they were the most important, because we discussed them thoroughly,” and adding any more, such as this one, “would be adding more strain to a vote.”

He added that if the amendment passes, “you put the minority in charge. That’s who has the power … they’re the ones that can stop or control things,” he said.

Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said that she doesn’t see the other issues in the charter that require a supermajority vote, such as the city keeping its own fire and police departments, as “Council tying its own hands; I consider that the residents of Oviedo chiming in and telling us how they want us to govern, and what threshold they want us to meet before we change the way our city operates.

”I think we owe it to the residents to give them the opportunity to vote on this,” she said. 

Established in east Seminole County, the rural boundary separates the urbanized area of Seminole County from the East Rural Area, which encompasses 74,668 acres on the east side of the county. The rural boundary was adopted into the county’s comprehensive plan in 1991, and voters approved to have it placed into the county’s charter in 2004, keeping the then-existing rural boundary lines in place.

The four other amendments Oviedo residents will have the opportunity to vote on in November include: 

• Changing length of Council terms from two to four years
• Revising Council voting procedures for ordinances and resolutions, removing the requirement of a role-call vote
• Revising the timeframe for holding special elections
• Moving the qualifying period to run for City Council