Rollins Halts Expansion Plans

Public Hearings on Alfond and Lawrence Center Projects Postponed

On August 29, Rollins College announced the cancellation of public hearings in September and October on the expansion of the Alfond Inn and the proposed construction on the Lawrence Center site at 200 E. New England Ave.

Phase II of the Alfond

The Alfond Inn expansion has been long in the works as Phase II of the original plan. It includes the addition of 70 hotel rooms, bringing the total to 182, and the addition of a spa and health club, 4,000 square feet of meeting space and just over 300 square feet of retail space. The expansion also called for an additional 153 parking spaces.

Relocation of Crummer Business School and Cornell Fine Arts Museum
Redevelopment of the Lawrence Center site, at New England and Lyman, was a three-phase project consisting of a new parking structure, a new facility for the Crummer Graduate School of Business and new space for the Cornell Fine Arts Museum.

In order to complete all three phases, the college was requesting a zoning change from Office (O-1) to Institutional (PQP or Public-Quasi-Public).

Public-Private Parking Arrangement with City

As part of Phase I of the project, Rollins was seeking a Conditional Use Permit to build a three-level parking garage to serve the business school and museum properties. The City of Winter Park was contemplating a public-private partnership to expand the garage to four or five stories. This would provide an additional 120-180 public parking spaces in the Central Business District (CBD) and would require a change in the height map from three to four or five stories.

‘Innovation Triangle’

In a letter from Rollins Vice-president of Business and Finance & Treasurer Ed Kania to City Manager Randy Knight, which was provided to the Voice by the City Communications Director Clarissa Howard, Kania described the three-part expansion – the Alfond, the Crummer Graduate School of Business and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum – as the “Innovation Triangle.”

Kania formally withdrew Rollins’ request for public hearings regarding the Innovation Triangle that had been scheduled in September and October. “We would like to withdraw these requests,” he wrote, “in order that we may investigate other potential parking locations to better meet the needs of the College and the residents of Winter Park.”

Projects on Temporary Hold

“With so many exciting and mission-critical projects taking shape at Rollins,” wrote Chief Marketing & Community Relations Officer Sam Stark, “we are putting a temporary hold on our Lawrence Center and Alfond Inn expansions in order to explore and evaluate some cost-saving and project-sharing opportunities that will benefit the College and the community.”

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    By: Anne Mooney

    Anne Mooney has assumed the editorship of the Winter Park Voice from founding editor Tom Childers.

    Mooney got her start in New York as a freelance line editor for book publishers, among them Simon & Schuster and the Clarkson Potter division of Crown Books. From New York, she and her husband and their year-old toddler moved to Washington, D.C., where the two ran a newswire service for Harper’s magazine. “We called it Network News,” said Mooney, “because it was a network of the Harper’s writers, whose work we edited into newspaper style and format and sold to papers in the top U.S. and Canadian markets. We were sort of like a tiny UPI.”

    The newswire ceased operation with the death of Mooney’s first husband, but Mooney continued to write and edit, doing freelance work for Williams Sonoma cookbooks and for local publications in D.C.

    In 2005, Mooney moved to Winter Park, where she worked as a personal chef and wrote a regular food column for a south Florida magazine. She took an active interest in Winter Park politics and was there when the Winter Park Voice was founded. She wrote occasional pieces for the Voice, including the Childers bio that this piece replaces.

    The Winter Park Voice is one of a large number of “hyper-local” publications that have sprung up across the U.S. in response to the decline of the major daily newspapers and the resulting deficit of local news coverage. The Voice’sbeat is Winter Park City Hall, and its purpose is to help the residents of our city better understand the political forces that shape our daily lives.

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