Winter Park board ponders over memory care

Does Winter Park have a need for more memory care centers for seniors? If so, then they aren’t coming easy.

The potential need for memory care centers in Winter Park clashed with the city’s tenet of preserving its village character on Tuesday as a proposal for a 34,986-square-foot, three-story memory care facility came before the city’s Planning and Zoning Board for approval.

The 50-bed center called Villa Tuscany would be located at the south end of the intersection of Howell Branch Road and Temple Trail.

The City Commission chambers were filled to the point of overflow during the meeting, with some residents forced to watch through the open door from the lobby. But the large group of locals was split on the issue. Some residents emphasized that Winter Park has a growing need – a need that the new facility meets.

“It’s an emergency,” said Maitland resident Amy O’Rourke, the founder of Cameron Group Aging Life Care Services. “I’ve helped 17,000 older people over 17 years, and every single week I’m telling people ‘No, there is no facility in Winter Park. We’ll have to send you to Lake Nona or Winter Springs.’”

“I and my staff listen to that week after week after week. It’s a need.”

But some nearby Winter Park residents like David Greenberg believed the facility was simply too big, clashing with the character of the surrounding homes.

“I think it’s cynical to play on our heart strings about the importance of elder care when no one disputes that,” Greenberg said. “The only dispute is whether this project fits this particular parcel.”

“This particular piece of land is just not a fit, and the facility is not a fit for this property.”

Board member Tom Sacha agreed that a memory care facility seems to be needed, but that the proposed facility is simply too big.

The memory care facility discussed on Tuesday was the third center of its kind to come before the city since December 2014. The two previous projects both saw similar arguments about being out of scale and never came to fruition. Those include a facility proposed by ROC Seniors at the old Progress Point site along Orange Avenue and another facility proposed by Sentio Investments LLC at the empty lot next to the St. John Lutheran Church off of Orlando Avenue.

“We’ve sat up here in the last year and had this come up at the pumpkin patch, we had it come up at Progress Energy, and now we’re coming up at Howell Branch,” Board member Ross Johnston said. “It’s been the same argument all three times, the scale is out of size, and we’ve asked them to scale it back.”

“The question goes back to the builders, the profitability and what they can make work profitably on the land.”

The Planning and Zoning Board found a middle ground: voting to approve the use of a memory care facility, but asking the applicant to return with a different design that’s more in scale with the surrounding community.