PUBLIC COPY: COMMISSIONER LETTER SENT SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 Joseph Maynard to Jack Mariano, with Ron Oakley, Seth Weightman, Kathryn Starkey and Lisa Yeager copied. Gmail confirmed sent. This does not confirm inclusion in the hearing record. No exhibits were attached, despite the letter referring to exhibits. Resident observations in this letter are attributed personal accounts, not independent measurements or verified incident reports. Historical review comments may be superseded by later records. The hearing notice/deadline and engineering questions remain under review. Personal sender email and phone, and the email confidentiality footer, are omitted from this public copy. Punctuation has been normalized for the website. Dear Commissioners, I am writing regarding the proposed Mitras rezoning, RZ-7901 / REZONE-2025-00016 / PDE26-7901, for up to 77 homes at 12500 Hamlin Road. As someone who lives in this neighborhood and regularly travels Kent Grove Drive, Price Lane and the surrounding roads, I ask that the Board closely examine whether the record actually demonstrates adequate road access, traffic safety, drainage, flood protection and compatibility with the community that already exists here. For those of us who live here, these concerns are not theoretical. We have lived through flooding on Kent Grove Drive, Price Lane, Valencia Drive, Marsh Road and McBride Road after ordinary heavy rains, not only during major hurricanes or extraordinary storms. There are low areas where water routinely collects, shoulders erode, potholes grow, and residents sometimes end up marking hazards themselves because drivers who do not know the roads cannot see what is underneath the water. On Price Lane, my family has driven through standing water deep enough to reach above the rocker panels of our vehicles. That is not something I read in a drainage report. It is something we have actually had to drive through to get home. One incident in particular has stayed with my family. During flooding, a firetruck responding in our area could not safely continue beyond the area residents refer to as the "mailbox row" because of the road conditions. Mail delivery also does not continue down that portion of the road. Whatever terminology is used in a traffic or engineering report, that experience raises a very basic question for residents: if existing conditions can already interfere with normal access and emergency response, what happens when substantially more homes and vehicles depend on this same network? That history matters when considering another 77 homes. The signed May 2025 traffic study contains counts at Kent Grove Drive and SR 52, but its intersection operating analysis addresses SR 52/Shady Hills Road and SR 52/US 41. It does not provide delay or queue results for our neighborhood's exit. Its count diagram shows the shared left/right outbound lane that residents describe. Anyone who actually uses that intersection knows why this matters. Kent Grove has one outbound lane. A vehicle waiting for an opportunity to turn left onto SR 52 can prevent vehicles behind it from turning right even when a right turn would otherwise be available. On the opposite movement, vehicles traveling eastbound on SR 52 and turning left onto Kent Grove depend on the available turn-lane storage. Residents have raised concerns about what happens when that storage fills and vehicles begin backing toward the through lanes. We need the analysis of those actual movements, not simply acceptable results from different intersections farther away. The county's October 2025 comments separately require an Access Management Analysis covering Kent Grove Drive/SR 52 at preliminary-plan review. Please explain what evidence supports adequate access at the rezoning stage, what remains deferred until later review, and which enforceable improvements would address the morning and afternoon conditions residents encounter. The study's favorable conclusions for the intersections it analyzed do not resolve those neighborhood-specific questions. Kent Grove Drive has received a new base and paving through Lussier Lane, and residents recognize that improvement. The concern is not that nothing has been done. The concern is that the paving project stopped there and, according to residents' observations, did not resolve the drainage problems that occur along the road network. The dip near Kent Grove Drive and SR 52 continues to collect water. Other sections of the neighborhood, including Price Lane, continue to experience standing water and flooded access during significant rainfall. Paving a road surface and solving the movement of water are not necessarily the same project. Please provide the completed-work plans and drainage scope for the Kent Grove paving project and explain what drainage work, if any, accompanied it. Please also identify how the remaining ponding and flood-prone sections will be addressed before additional development traffic is introduced. The older county records identify Kent Grove Drive and Hamlin Road as substandard, but they should not be used to describe the repaved segment as though that work has not occurred. At the same time, the existence of new pavement should not be treated as evidence that drainage, intersection capacity, emergency access and the remaining road network have all been resolved. Please clarify whether the completed paving satisfies any Mitras road-mitigation obligation, how the proposed $375,000 contribution relates to that work, and which drainage, intersection or remaining-road improvements would still be required. There is also a broader compatibility issue that should not get lost in the engineering discussion. This neighborhood did not develop as a conventional suburban subdivision. The surrounding area contains larger residential lots, wooded properties, pasture and agricultural land. Many properties depend on wells and septic systems. Mature trees, open space and wildlife are normal parts of living here. Roads and drainage infrastructure reflect that rural development pattern as well. The Mitras property itself has historically been a roughly 40-acre agricultural property. The proposal would allow as many as 77 detached homes on that single tract. That is not simply a change in the number of houses. It represents a fundamentally different development pattern from much of the community surrounding it. For comparison purposes, I ask staff and the Board to place objective information in the record showing the existing lot sizes immediately surrounding the property and along the affected neighborhood roads, and compare those with the proposed lots. The same comparison should address setbacks, building separation, buffers, tree preservation, lighting, privacy, impervious surface and the relationship between the proposed development and existing residences. "Compatibility" should be something the public can examine on a map and in measurements, not merely a conclusion in a staff report. Our neighborhood's rural character also affects how water behaves. We have large areas where rain currently falls onto pasture, wooded property and relatively low-density residential land. Residents are not qualified to calculate what happens when a 40-acre parcel is cleared, graded, filled, covered with roads, roofs and driveways, and provided with engineered stormwater storage. That is exactly why the engineering analysis matters. Community accounts place Commissioner Jack Mariano at the Kent Grove site meeting on September 15, 2026. Residents identify the meeting location as the creek area on Kent Grove Drive where flooding occurs, and Cody McBride scheduled the visit for September 15 at 9:00 a.m. Please include any county inspection notes, photographs, findings and follow-up actions from that visit in the hearing record so the public can understand what county personnel observed and what conclusions were reached. Flooding deserves the same concrete examination. The county identifies a northern flood-zone area, and the applicant's ecological report describes stream and floodplain habitat. Residents have photographs and videos showing water on neighborhood roads and property. Those photographs are not intended to substitute for an engineered drainage model. They establish something different and equally important: the existing conditions from which that model must begin. The question residents need answered is what happens to those known locations after the proposed site's grading, fill, roads, homes, detention facilities and discharge structures are constructed. Those questions are especially important to families who have already experienced conditions severe enough to interfere with vehicle and emergency access. The October 2025 utility review also reported insufficient water capacity at the proposed west-Talavera connection. Please identify the current approved service solution and the required easement rights rather than leave the community to rely on an earlier assumption or an unverified report of a later decision. I recognize that staff has recommended approval and that the earlier traffic study evaluated a higher number of homes than the current 77-home cap. My concern is narrower: whether the evidence presently in the record demonstrates that this particular site, this particular road network and this particular drainage system can accommodate the requested zoning while satisfying the county's applicable access, safety, compatibility and flooding requirements. Residents should not have to choose between accepting assumptions now and discovering the consequences during site-plan review or after construction begins. If required access, drainage or compatibility analyses remain outstanding, I ask that those issues be resolved through the appropriate public process before a final decision is made, with enough information available for residents and the Board to evaluate the conclusions rather than simply being told that they will be addressed later. Please place this email and my exhibits in the hearing record. Please also confirm the current hearing date and submission requirements and identify the specific studies, findings, conditions and enforceable improvements upon which the Board ultimately relies. The people who live here understand these roads because we drive them every day. We understand where the water collects because we have driven through it. We understand what happens when a road becomes difficult or impossible to traverse because our families have experienced it. Those experiences do not replace engineering. They tell the engineers, and the Board, where the engineering needs to provide answers. Respectfully, Joseph Maynard Price Lane [personal phone omitted] [personal email omitted]