EATONVILLE, Fla. — Eatonville community leaders say they have a plan to finally develop the former Hungerford School site, and it won’t be a Black history museum.
On Tuesday, consultants presented a plan that included space for housing, multiple schools, stores, a new City Hall and parks. The plan ties the property to the city’s main street and connects residential areas to an underutilized lakefront.
There are tentative plans to put an agricultural-focused magnet school with lab space and 15 acres of farming or community gardens, they said, which would be located near tech-focused offices to create a school-to-job pipeline.
“Our focus was to secure the vitality from an economic side and an educational side first,” Eatonville Chief Administrative Officer Demetris Pressley said.
The proposal came after a year of consulting with community members about what the city needed most and how the site could serve the community.
Emphasis was placed on how to increase tax revenue for the city, which has dealt with financial issues created by its underdevelopment relative to neighboring Maitland and Winter Park.
However, when Orange County school board members asked how the city plans to bring the plans from paper to reality, few answers were available. The city’s leaders said they were trying to figure out what was realistic, given their limited tax base.
Orange County Public Schools currently owns the site and is restricted on how it can be developed. It has attempted to offload the land before to both public and private partners but has run into opposition from the community.
Chairwoman Teresa Jacobs noted that the board had resolved to sit back and let the community take the lead.
“What does the community need,” she asked.
Some Orange County Public Schools leaders expected the discussion to center more around a 1,000-student agriculture-focused school with a 40-acre working farm. Eatonville leaders said that plan was nixed, at least partially, because it did not generate enough tax revenue for the town.
“There is a need for us to work out some details,” Superintendent Maria Vazquez said.
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