Florida Lawmakers Battle Over Orange and Seminole Rural Boundaries

Florida’s legislative session closed this week with a rare victory for environmental advocates and local officials fighting to protect rural lands in Central Florida, but the battle over Orange and Seminole county boundaries is far from finished.

The Senate voted down an amendment that critics warned would have gutted voter-approved rural boundaries in both counties, handing developers a path to build across sensitive lands that residents have repeatedly fought to preserve. The fight drew in lawmakers from hundreds of miles away, raised questions about the role of the Florida Attorney General, and exposed the raw tension between property rights arguments and environmental protection that has defined Central Florida land use debates for years.

At the center of the conflict sat Republican Sen. Jonathan Martin of Fort Myers, whose home district sits nearly 200 miles from the affected counties. Martin told a Feb. 24 Senate Rules Committee meeting that he grew concerned about rural boundary policies after learning about the situation in Central Florida and reached out to the Attorney General’s office for a legal opinion.

“When I learned about the rural boundary issue that was taking place in Central Florida, I was concerned about its effects down in my district, if that was something that people in Southwest Florida wanted to take a closer look at,” Martin said at the committee meeting.

In December, the Florida Attorney General’s Office published a letter concluding that the rural boundaries in Seminole and Orange counties could be unconstitutional. That letter followed Martin’s request, which he made the prior year. Martin filed an amendment at the Feb. 24 committee meeting that would have allowed property owners to pursue development rights inside those protected zones.

Opponents called the AG letter a political document dressed up as legal analysis.

“This is horrible analysis. It is full of flawed reasoning and I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s developing a pretextual excuse for this legislator to introduce a bill,” said David Bear, a lawyer and president of the nonprofit Save Rural Seminole.

Bear and others pushing back on the amendment pointed to an overwhelming democratic record supporting the boundaries. Roughly 80 percent of Seminole County voters approved the rural boundary in 2004, and the measure survived challenges in both state and federal courts. Orange County voters backed their own rural boundaries by wide margins in 2024.

Rep. David Smith, a Winter Springs Republican whose district sits inside Seminole County, argued the boundaries serve a function well beyond slowing suburban sprawl. Eastern Seminole County borders the St. Johns River and holds the largest aquifer recharge area in Florida. Many residents rely on septic systems, making groundwater protection a direct public health concern.

“If you want to build willy-nilly, if you want to overbuild, you’re starting to threaten the aquifer,” Smith said. “The whole restriction is as you get closer to the St. Johns River, the density is reduced.”

The stakes of that argument come into focus when looking at past development proposals for the area. Former state Rep. Chris Dorworth, whose name Martin notably avoided mentioning at the committee meeting, sought in 2018 to build a project called River Cross on nearly 700 acres of protected Seminole land. The project called for 600 single-family homes, 270 townhomes, 500 apartment units and 1.5 million square feet of commercial and professional space. Dorworth sued to push the development through, lost the legal fight, and was ordered to pay Seminole County $432,000 in legal fees.

The Senate floor vote defeating the amendment handed advocates a win for this session, but the political pressure behind the amendment is unlikely to disappear. The Attorney General’s letter remains on the record. Developers who want access to that land still have financial incentive to push. And Martin has signaled he plans to keep the issue alive.

Advocates and local officials who spent this session fighting the amendment are already preparing for 2027, when the same arguments will almost certainly return in a new form. For communities along the St. Johns River and above one of the state’s most critical aquifers, the margin for error is small and the next session starts sooner than it seems.