City approves Maitland Estate apartments

Twelve years after the Maitland City Council approved its existence, a 300-unit mixed-use apartment project in the downtown district is finally coming to fruition.

The city’s Development Review Committee gave its seal of approval to the project, called Maitland Estates, after a lengthy meeting last week. Scrutiny from DRC was the last step of the development’s review process, which started more than a decade ago receiving the green light from City Council and the city’s Planning & Zoning Board in 2004.

“Even though it was 12 years ago it started, this was just the last board review they hadn’t gone through yet,” Community Development Director Dick Wells said.

Twelve years ago redeveloping Maitland’s downtown was still a dream. Shoppers still strode in and out of the city’s Winn Dixie, and city hall was half the size it is today. Today one of those buildings is a pile of rubble, the other a parking lot, both demolished to make way for new downtown developments.

The empty lot on U.S. Highway 17-92 north of Maitland’s Publix between Sybelia Parkway and George Avenue will be the next downtown lot to undergo a facelift. Rising from the ground will be the six-story Maitland Estates apartment building and parking garage, with 45,000 square feet of retail space. The retail is split between the ground floor of the apartment building facing 17-92 and in a two-story drive-through building, which city code says can’t be a restaurant.

Lawsuits stalled the project back when it was first proposed in 2004, under the name Uptown Maitland West, then the developer committed suicide in 2008, and its progress halted until earlier this year when a new developer proposed bringing the project back to life under its previously approved developer’s agreement.

Wells said Maitland’s city attorney, along with the project’s attorney, agreed that the developer’s agreement is still valid, along with the motions to approve it by the City Council and Planning & Zoning Commission a decade ago.

So last Thursday, applicant Jennifer Tobin, a real estate lawyer from Shutts & Bowen, presented the DRC with new development plans from ACi Architects. After three and a half hours debating and negotiating the details, the board voted unanimously that the project fit the intent of the original developer’s agreement, allowing the long stalled development to become a reality.

“We had to make some interpretations and they had to make some concessions… and it works,” Wells said.

There are still details to be worked out, he said, and another meeting to discuss those is being planned, but the project itself has been approved.

Maitland Mayor Dale McDonald, who served on Planning & Zoning when the development first passed in 2004, said he has conflicting opinions of the project and the way it has come to fruition.

“It will be thought of as progress, and I hope it is,” he said.

Maitland Estates, he said, brings the total number of apartments recently approved, under construction or possible to be developed under city code to roughly 2,900 units.

“You start adding those things together… and pretty soon there’s a serious number of new residents coming in,” McDonald said.

The city, he said, is evolving from its beginnings as a small, bedroom community.

“It’s culture changing,” he said. “…When is enough enough?”