Hidden in shady solitude of Split Oak Forest is an oak tree cleaved in half, perhaps by lightning or its own monumental girth.
Yet the oak survives spectacularly as a mossy namesake and symbolic of the bruising and antagonistic split over how to protect the beloved forest amid a tsunami of growth aimed at the biggest remaining frontier of Central Florida’s natural landscape.
Split Oak Forest in Orange and Osceola counties is in the path of a planned, regional expressway extending east from near Orlando’s airport to a rural area poised for enormous growth. A coalition of forest defenders are backing a referendum on Orange County’s November ballot that could halt construction of the road and keep the forest boundaries intact. Their campaign is “Save Split Oak Forest.”
“I personally and many people working on this see it as a systemic environmental injustice,” said Valerie Anderson, leader of the Friends of Split Oak, which vows to keep the road out of a forest acquired a quarter century ago.
But the leaders of the 120-year-old environmental group Audubon Florida, which has dozens of scientists and professional environmental experts stationed across the state, warn that approving the amendment to stop construction would accelerate the forest’s destruction.
Accepting the road offers a “rare opportunity” to leverage government and developers into creating large conservation tracts next to the forest and into contributing millions of dollars to care for that land, they say. They think the result would bolster Split Oak’s survival as residential, commercial and industrial growth attacks its flanks.
Without the buffer protection from the additional conservation tracts, “Split Oak becomes in effect an unmanageable postage stamp that will dwindle away in its ecological importance,” said Audubon Florida’s advocacy directer, Charles Lee.
The two groups’ opposing perspectives have fed into one of the region’s most divisive and consequential environmental conflicts in memory, with the outcome likely to affect quality of life for the eastern sides of Orange and Osceola counties.
Yet the controversy remains obscure to many voters just weeks from the election.
Recently, a half-dozen solo and group hikers near the forest’s main entrance in Osceola County said they thought — incorrectly — that the Save Split Oak Forest ballot referendum was about the threat of a housing development. None knew of the planned road.
Tom Kamin, a retired airline worker, has for 20 years hiked often in the forest, been thrilled by its wildlife and has cycled area roads, observing development already flooding a landscape he had regarded as untouchable.
“This was far out in the country,” Kamin said.
An environmental lifeboat
Split Oak Forest, which spans a vertical rectangle of more than 21/2 square miles, is alluring as more of a gentle park and less of rugged wilderness.
It provides regular shade, easy trails, a mosaic of pines and oaks, and glimpses of a particularly gorgeous animal, the southern fox squirrel. Forest managers don’t count visitors but they anticipate as many as 160 daily, while prohibiting pets, camping and cycling, and not providing bathrooms.
“It is like heaven,” said Orange County Commissioner Maribel Gomez Cordero, adding that Split Oak reminds her of forests in her native Puerto Rico. “I would cry if anything happened to Split Oak.”
The forest is revered by many visitors as their sanctuary. But the primary, designated purpose of its existence is not for people to enjoy, as is the task of a state park, but for the protection of a vanishing, native landscape.
In that regard and at the crux of controversy, Split Oak is an environmental lifeboat.
The oak that gives the forest its name is among several split oaks in an area reached with a pleasant walk from Orange County’s adjoining Moss Park.
But the 200-year-old namesake oak, draped in ferns and moss, is the grandest. The 10-foot gap between its halves is carpeted with leaves. The separated trunks soar upward.
There is another part of the forest, however, that from ecosystem considerations is what ecologists swoon over. It is the most pristine of its kind in Split Oak and in all of Florida. It is called scrubby flatwoods.
On a recent Sunday at dawn and a short distance inside Split Oak’s southern boundary, early light cast longleaf pines as silhouettes. Cool, moist pockets of air smelled cleanly of cedar sawdust, while warm, dry pockets carried a musky scent.
With more light, the panorama revealed how widely scattered longleaf pines hold their canopies up high and the forest floor is thickly textured with grasses, flowering plants and scrubby oak and other shrubs – home to an encyclopedia of wildlife.
“Those trees are older than 100 years; you can tell by their flattop nature,” said Dan Hipes, director of the Florida Natural Areas Inventory. The trees predate the clear-cutting of Florida’s forests, which means the landscape has remained much like what nature started with.
“There would have been a lot of that across the state, but now there is not,” Hipps said. “Because we have turned it into pastures, plowed it, put roads on it and everything else.”
A group funded by state government, the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, has staked out 68 reference sites that are the state’s most pristine examples of habitats. A 12-acre expanse of scrubby flatwoods at Split Oak Forest is one. By that measure, it is the forest’s most prized environment.
At sunrise, birds were chorusing peeps and chirps. Also drifting through wisps of fog was a faint tat-tat-tat like a woodpecker pounding into bark. But that wasn’t the source.
It was the knocking of a new residential development at Split Oak’s door.
‘It’s coming,’ developer says
“Our development is already approved and it’s coming,” said Jim Zboril, president of Tavistock Development Co., which previously created the 17-square-mile Lake Nona community that encompasses Medical City.
Immediately south of Split Oak’s fence and to the east, roofers were nailing shingles, with sharp pop-pop-pops at a home under construction at Blue Pond Way and Del Webb Boulevard.
That new intersection is in Tavistock’s newly opened Del Webb Sunbridge subdivision. The 55-plus community is to have 1,350 homes on 700 acres that nudge against Split Oak Forest. It is the first of many housing developments ahead, with capacity for tens of thousands of residents.
Tavistock’s partner is Suburban Land Reserve. It is a subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, possibly the largest landowner in Florida and the owner of Central Florida’s Deseret Ranches.
With more than 300,000 acres in Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties, and far larger than Seminole County, Deseret Ranches is one of the nation’s biggest agricultural operations.
While currently a vast space of wetlands, pasture and forest, Deseret Ranches will host Tavistock’s vision for a metropolitan landscape about 25 miles southeast of downtown Orlando.
“Do we want to get ahead of this and get a road or not?” Zboril said. “It’s going to be needed someday.”
The planned road is an extension of the tolled Osceola Parkway, starting at State Road 417 south of Orlando International Airport and next to Medical City.
It would zigzag south and east nearly 9 miles, cutting across the bottom of Split Oak Forest, and halt near the Del Webb subdivision. Backers of the road are pushing for it to connect ultimately to the coastal Interstate 95.
Agreeing to build the road, delayed by the pandemic, is the Central Florida Expressway Authority, the toll-road agency that operates many of the region’s busiest highways.
Tavistock and Suburban Land Reserve would donate much of the land for the $800 million road, and they would donate undeveloped land as compensation for damage to Split Oak.
The route would take 60 acres of Split Oak for roadway and leave 100 acres of isolated and likely sacrificed forest between the road and the forest’s south fence. In exchange for those 160 acres, Tavistock and Suburban Land Reserve are offering 1,550 acres of varied terrain in two tracts adjoining or near Split Oak.
Audubon Florida thinks it’s a good deal. The 1,550 acres are of mixed landscape: some of high environmental quality, some moderately impaired and some, including former citrus grove, a mess.
The 1,689 acres of Split Oak Forest were of uneven quality when the property was purchased. “The area has been under management for more than 25 years,” said wildlife commission biologist David Turner. “We have it in pretty good shape.”
Lee said the natural features of the 1,550 acres could similarly be revitalized in 25 years.
A major advantage of the deal, he and supporters say, is that the parcels would stitch together and provide a buffer for Split Oak, Moss Park and Isle of Pine Preserve. Along with other protected lands, the result would be a 5,375-acre island of conservation comparable to the expanse of Wekiwa Springs State Park.
Of the 12 acres of scrubby flatwoods, Lee said some would be lost to the road. But the only chance of protecting the remainder from growth would be with the shield of 1,550 acres of buffering landscape.
Anderson adamantly opposes the deal; the 1,550 acres aren’t of enough environmental value and every inch of the south end of Split Oak Forest must be saved, she said.
Anderson said protection of the south end of Split Oak can be done painstakingly at the edge of urban growth as demonstrated elsewhere in Florida.
“In managing these small areas, we have to look to places like Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County,” she said.
Vote won’t end road fight
If passed, the Orange County ballot referendum may prohibit county commissioners from further supporting the road. But because commissioners already have approved the plan, there is debate over whether the referendum would be too late or have the legal teeth to matter.
Whatever voters decide, the fight will not likely end.
“I don’t think it stops this road. It might delay the road. It might make the road cost more because there are going to be more houses in the pathway of the road,” said Tavistock’s Zboril. “I don’t think it stops growth in Central Florida.”
The vote may not stop growth. But road opponents view a victory as having political and symbolic weight for confronting forces turning Florida into unlivable congestion.
Environmentalists and their groups typically strive to appear united in a cause. But many road opponents have made the conflict personal, taking shots at Lee’s expertise and motives.
Friends of Split Oak has urged followers to target him as an appeaser of developers and as “deeply distrusted by many in the environmental community.”
Defending Lee is the person most responsible for creating Split Oak Forest to begin with, former Orange County Mayor Linda Chapin.
“I’m not in favor of the road, but I am in favor of a compromise that improves the future of Split Oak,” Chapin said. She said Lee, an architect of the compromise, has been criticized as a sellout. “He has taken a beating in this and it’s not right,” she said.
Lee joined Audubon Florida in the 1970 and was a vice president engaging in environmental battles statewide by the early 1980s.
“The man has been a lion of conservation in Florida for nearly 50 years, and it frustrates me that people quickly forget the debt frankly that we owe to him,” said Julie Wraithmell, the group’s executive director.
Lee remains undeterred. He said his lifetime of advocacy has shown him that government regulations and land-buying programs no longer can be trusted. Battles must be fought according to their circumstances, he said.
“It is an easy position to conceptualize to say you must stay out of Split Oak,” Lee said. “The reality is that under a no-road scenario where the current development approvals simply develop out over time, Split Oak is toast, as are Moss Park and Isle of Pines in terms of any kind of ecological context.”
kspear@orlandosentinel.com
