When Orange County Commissioners voted 5–2 in late March to approve Discovery Church’s 800-seat campus in the Lake Avalon Rural Settlement, the reaction was immediate and fierce. Residents flooded public comment. Local news ran the story for weeks. Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad delivered what may be the most quoted line in recent West Orange County political history: “This vote wasn’t about a church. It was about whether our rules mean anything.”
She was right that the rules were being tested. She was looking at the wrong project.
Four months earlier, with far less public fury and almost no media attention, Orange County commissioners approved a 199-pad RV park on the same road. Same intersection. Same rural settlement. Different rules — and a state law that made it nearly impossible to stop.
The story of what is actually happening to Lake Avalon’s rural character isn’t the church. It never was.
Two Projects. One Intersection. Wildly Different Outcomes.
The Discovery Church campus sits on 19.97 acres at the northeast corner of McKinney Road and Rex Drive. The church was gifted the land. It will have an 800-seat main sanctuary, a 162-seat student ministry, classrooms, a kids’ auditorium and offices — all in a single 42,000 square-foot building. It will hold three Sunday morning services at 8:30, 10:00, and 11:45 a.m.
The Rex Groves RV Park — now branded as Old Florida Groves — sits on 84.6 acres on the west side of Rex Drive, north of McKinney Road. Same corner. It will have 199 campsites, a clubhouse, a pool, an event barn, a museum and discovery center, and a “farm core area.” Its owners have held the property since 2021.
The Orange County Commission granted special exception approval for the Rex Groves RV Park on November 19, 2024, ending months of deliberation.
The church approval, four months later, drew protests, news cameras and impassioned commissioner speeches about protecting rural Florida.
The RV park approval drew a county planning note and a list of conditions.
The Numbers Nobody Compared
The community’s central concern about Discovery Church was traffic. Residents and commissioners pointed repeatedly to the prospect of nearly 350 cars on McKinney Road three times every Sunday morning. Services are at 8:30, 10 and 11:45 a.m.
A church with 800 seats operates three times on Sunday morning. That is the peak traffic event. Monday through Saturday, McKinney Road sees nothing from it.
A 199-pad RV park operates 365 days a year. Every day, guests arrive. Every day, guests depart. And this particular RV park sits within easy driving distance of Walt Disney World. Resident Jane Ferguson, a longtime RVer herself, spoke against the proposal specifically because of its proximity to Disney World — warning the project would result in more traffic from visitors leaving the campgrounds daily to visit the theme parks.
That is not Sunday morning traffic. That is a continuous, year-round stream of families in tow vehicles pulling trailers, loading strollers, and heading to the interstate — every single morning, every single day of the year.
The math is not close.
The Legal Loophole That Changed Everything
Orange County commissioners did not have the same discretion over the RV park that they had over the church.
Discovery Church needed a special exception to build in the Lake Avalon Rural Settlement. Special exceptions are fully discretionary. Commissioners can approve them. They can deny them. The community’s voice carries real weight — which is exactly why the 2022 version of the same church was denied 4–3.
The RV park took a different path. Old Florida Groves positioned the project as an agritourism facility — a working grove operation with camping as an accessory use. That framing was not just marketing. It was a legal strategy.
Florida Statute 570.85 is clear: “a local government may not adopt or enforce a local ordinance, regulation, rule, or policy that prohibits, restricts, regulates, or otherwise limits an agritourism activity on land classified as agricultural land.”
In plain English: if your land has an agricultural tax classification and your activity qualifies as agritourism, the county’s hands are significantly tied. Residents themselves acknowledged this reality during the community meeting, stating that agri-tourism is regulated at the state level, and the community was focused only on affecting those portions of the project where it had influence.
Translation: they knew they could not stop it. The best they could do was shape the conditions around it.
The church had no such protection. A religious institution on A-1 zoned land in a rural settlement requires a clean special exception with full community review and full commissioner discretion. The RV park wore the agritourism label like a shield — and it worked.
The Project That Almost Didn’t Happen — And Then Did
The road to approval for the RV park was not straight. After more than an hour of discussion, the Orange County Board of Zoning Adjustment voted in September 2024 to deny the applicant’s request to build a 249-site RV park in the Lake Avalon Rural Settlement.
That denial should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
The project started at 277 sites. When community opposition mounted, it dropped to 249. When the BZA denied the 249-site version in September 2024, the applicant came back to the full County Commission — bypassing the BZA’s recommendation — and got approval at 199 sites in November 2024.
The approval came with 13 additional conditions: exit lanes restricted to right-out only, a 6-foot opaque fence along the western boundary, maximum stays of 28 consecutive days, and a commitment from the applicant to contribute to road improvements on Avalon Road, Summerlake Park Boulevard, Porter Road and Tilden Road.
Road contributions. Not road construction. Contributions.
Meanwhile, resident Mark Fox asked directly at a church community meeting: “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? McKinney is a county lane; it is not suitable, as it is today, for what’s already been approved.”
Fox was talking about the church. He could have been talking about the RV park. He could have been talking about both.
A Settlement Designed for a Different Era
The Lake Avalon Rural Settlement was created in 2004 by the Orange County Board of Commissioners and is one of twenty-two rural settlements in the county. In 2024, Orange County created the Lake Avalon Preservation District in order to control annexation of LARS properties by nearby municipalities.
Two layers of protection. Created specifically to prevent the kind of development pressure that is now arriving anyway — just wearing different labels.
The Rural Settlement framework was built for a world where the primary threats were residential subdivisions and commercial strip centers. It was not built for 84-acre agritourism campgrounds leveraging state preemption laws. It was not built for a legal environment where branding a project as a “grove experience” with a museum and a farm core area effectively removes it from local oversight.
The church, ironically, played by the rules. It applied for a special exception. It went through the BZA. It was denied in 2022. It revised its plans. It came back. It went through the full public process again. And it was ultimately approved with conditions — including a size reduction and 15 acres of dedicated preservation land on a 19.97-acre site.
The Church That Nobody Complained About
There is one more fact worth stating plainly. Lake Avalon already has a large church. It has operated in the rural settlement for a decade. Tens of thousands of Sunday services. Zero traffic crises. Zero documented rural character emergencies. No news stories. No commissioner speeches. No packed public hearings.
The notion that an 800-seat church represents an existential threat to rural life in Lake Avalon was never supported by the lived experience of the community. It was a fear. A projection. And in the political theater of county commission hearings, it made a much better villain than a private investment group with a citrus grove tax classification and 199 RV pads.
The Real Question Lake Avalon Should Be Asking
Commissioner Martinez Semrad’s statement after the church vote deserves to be read in full, because it reveals how the entire framing of this issue went wrong: “This vote wasn’t about a church. It was about whether our rules mean anything. The same BCC members denied a smaller version of this same church project before. Now, somehow, bigger is acceptable. These communities do not want mega-sized anything dropped into rural places.”
She is a committed advocate for rural settlements. Her concern is genuine. But the commission she serves approved a 199-pad RV park near Disney World on the same road four months before that speech — a project residents themselves said they lacked the legal tools to stop.
The rules she is defending are precisely the rules that the agritourism framework circumvents. And not a single major news outlet in Central Florida has written that sentence.
The story coming out of Lake Avalon in 2026 is not whether a church is too big for a rural road. The real question is this: how many parcels in the Lake Avalon Rural Settlement carry agricultural tax classifications that would qualify their owners for agritourism preemption under Florida Statute 570.85?
How many investors, watching what happened at 5872 Rex Drive, are already consulting attorneys about their own parcels?
Winter Garden resident Denise Martinez said it at the church hearing: “Approving even one mega facility will have far-reaching consequences.” She was looking at the church when she said it. She should have turned around.