Concerns rise over church proposal in Lake Avalon area

Residents shared concerns about Discovery Church building a new 48,000-square-foot campus in the Lake Avalon Rural Settlement during a community meeting Tuesday, Nov. 4, at Bridgewater Middle School. 

Discovery Church was gifted 19.97 acres on the northeast corner of McKinney Road and Rex Drive, west of Avalon Road and east of the Lake County line.

The church is seeking a special exception to allow a religious institution on the property, as well as a variance to allow grass parking in lieu of parking on an improved surface. 

The church is proposing a 48,000-square-foot, one-level building with 800 sanctuary seats and a 353-space parking lot with some grass spaces. 

Rob Garrett, director of operations at Discovery Church, said church leadership took previous community feedback into consideration when creating this proposal. He said starting in January 2024, leadership started meeting with several community members to gather input.

He said in the previous attempt to build the church on the property, he said people were concerned about the amount of vacant space on the property and questions were brought up about whether the church would expand the building or build a school. 

To show everyone the church has no plans to build anything but the church building on the property, Garrett said the church will grow a new orange grove; there will be a native tree nursery with oak trees; existing trees will be reserved; and there will be a butterfly garden with internal unpaved walking paths. 

There also will be a wild landscaping buffer. The application team learned about re-wilding, which would help preserve and restore the trees and landscaping to bring in wildlife. 

“We’re trying to plan for everything we could do based on this property and stay as it is,” Garrett said. “We look at it and we say, ‘Well, 20 acres to us is just a great way of preserving 20 acres with only one single use.’ There will be no other buildings. There will be nothing else built on this property.”

As for the square footage of the building, which many residents had concerns about, Garrett said the architect purposefully put in indentations, bump outs and more into the floor plan to make the building more esthetically pleasing to the rural settlement. 

“The reason (the building) is long like this is to try to stretch it out so we could end up with an elevation that has a front elevation with different roof lines that pop out so you can see different things, so that it would fit more in the architecture of the rural settlement, rather than just having a tilt-up wall panel or something smaller in a box,” Garrett said. 

For parking, it is required to have one space for every three seats. With the church planning to have 800 seats, the required number of parking spaces is 267. There also is a requirement for one space per employee, and the church will have 24 employees, adding 24 parking spaces. The total required parking is 291 spaces. The church plans to have 343 parking spaces with an additional 10 ADA spaces. 

Laekin O’Hara, Orange County Zoning Division chief planner for this project, said staff is reviewing the proposal against six special exception criteria. For staff to make a recommendation for approval, it has to meet all six criteria. Members of other divisions, including the Planning Division and Transportation, also provide input on the proposal. 

The recommendation will go before the Board of Zoning Adjustment tentatively Thursday, Dec. 4, and if the board recommends approval, the proposal will go before the Orange County Board of County Commissioners tentatively Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. 

Residents said they did not have an issue with the property being used to build a church. Their primary concerns were regarding the size of the church and impact on traffic.

Residents questioned why the church needed to have so much square footage and have 800 seats when Discovery Church is planning to relocate its Winter Garden campus, which seats 535, to the settlement. 

Garrett said the church isn’t expecting to be at capacity for every service. He said more likely, between 250 and 300 are necessary for the church.

Community members’ main concern was in relation to traffic, with the potential for nearly 350 cars congesting their roads three times every Sunday. Services are at 8:30, 10 and 11:45 a.m. There also would be campers checking out of the RV park going in nearby and other churches in the area finishing services at similar times on Sundays. 

Residents said McKinney Road can’t handle the traffic already making its way down that road, and Rex Drive is a residential road. They shared concerns for the safety of their children and neighbors as people like to ride horses, four-wheelers, dirt bikes and more. 

“At what point is the county going to say if you’re going to get approval for land use, you must pay to widen the road,” resident Mark Fox said. “McKinney is a county lane; it is not suitable, as it is today, for what’s already been approved.”

Residents questioned who will maintain the dirt roads and who will ensure congregants do not go down the residential roads to escape the traffic. 

Garrett said congregants listen well when leadership asks them to do something, so if they tell congregants to avoid certain roads and abide by traffic patterns, they will.