Oviedo Mayor Dominic Persampiere stands in front of what will become the city's new community center.
Oviedo may finally have a dedicated community center after the City Council voted 3-2 on Jan. 23, but some Council members are crying foul, saying the deal wasn’t transparent enough.
The center, which will transform the city’s abandoned former post office on Geneva Drive into a sprawling, renovated community gathering place, will cost the city about $200,000. Stretching out from the building, a courtyard could open up to retention ponds abutting the building and a portion of the Seminole County Trail system.
Mayor Dominic Persampiere said it’s a good deal for the city.
“It’s a great building to have it in,” Persampiere said. “It’s just a big rectangle. We can do anything we want with it.”
But how that building was purchased from former owner, USPS, and the holder of the ownership contract, the Evans family, represented at the Jan. 23 meeting by Arthur Evans, is under question by two Council members who dissented in the narrow vote to buy the building.
Of the about $400,000 the city agreed to pay for the building, $200,000 was donated back to the city in the form of environmental impact fee credits that the city had in effect refunded to the Evans family. Those credits had been promised to the family in 1998 in exchange for a pond along what is now Oviedo Boulevard, part of the new downtown project, Persampiere said.
But impact fee credits are supposed to be an incentive for new construction in the city, Councilmen Steve Henken and Stephen Schenck said. That construction never happened, they said.
“Arthur didn’t give us $200,000 cash,” Henken said. “He had impact fee credits on the books. In this deal he walked out with $200,000 cash. We’ve never let somebody walk out with impact fee credits before. You need to build things for those credits, which he didn’t.”
Schenck said that after consulting with city staff, he was alarmed at how much those impact fee credits were worth.
“It was something like 380 single family homes worth,” Schenck said. “That’s the magnitude of what you’d have to build to get that kind of money back.”
Persampiere said that the money would have been paid to the Evans’ anyway, and that if they ever develop any of their other land in the city, they’ll have to pay the city impact fees in return.
“Anytime somebody wants to give us 50 percent of the impact fee credits back, I’m all for it,” Persampiere said.
Persampiere said that the building may help the city save some pain in the long run. Schenck agreed that the building was bought inexpensively, and could be renovated for between $400,000-$600,000.
That leaves the city available to build a dedicated amphitheater in the new downtown project, called Oviedo on the Park, rather than trying to integrate a community center with the amphitheater.
In the meantime, the city will be looking into a public/private partnership to raise funds to transform the post office, Persampiere said.
“The building is going to be developed into a first class event center,” he said.