Three Eatonville Applications, $135.5 Million Requested, One Sunset Question

The Short Version

Three separate organizations went before Orange County's Tourist Development Tax task force asking for money tied to the same historic ground in Eatonville, in the same funding cycle, with no combined application and no joint master plan on the record. The Tourist Development Tax, or TDT, is the county's hotel tax; a citizens advisory task force reviews requests and recommends which ones the county commissioners should fund.

• Town of Eatonville / TOECRA — Eatonville Heritage Tourism District — $22.5 million (of a $30 million combined project)
• Dr. Phillips Charities — Eatonville Museum of Culture & History and Heritage Park — $60 million (of an $85 million total project)
• Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community (P.E.C.) — Zora Neale Hurston® International Museum of Arts, Heritage and Culture — $53 million (of a $75 million estimated total)

Combined: $135.5 million requested from the same pot, for projects in the same place, built around the same history. These are the amounts requested, not amounts awarded — see the status note below.

Separately, the Town/TOECRA presentation addressed what happens when the CRA reaches its authorized sunset. The answer, from the CRA's own general counsel, told the task force the CRA "does not sunset" in 2027. It did not mention the approval step that the county's delegating resolution requires — or the matching condition in the Town's own resolution. That's the second half of this brief.

Part 1: Three Asks, Verified

All three figures below are confirmed against each organization's own written TDT application. The Town/TOECRA figures are also confirmed in the recording, where the Town's Chief Administrative Officer described "$22.5 million phased into the TDT support toward a $30 million combined project," and in the Dr. Phillips Charities presentation, whose board chair said, "We're asking TDT for $60 million." ^{1 3 5 7}

Each applicant's own year-by-year funding request adds up correctly to its stated total. The Town/TOECRA schedule, for example, runs $7.5 million in 2027, $10 million in 2028 and $5 million in 2029 — $22.5 million exactly. ¹

Where things stood at publication. These requests have not been sitting still, and the reader should not take the table above as a live, undecided pool:

• On July 21, 2026, at a preliminary review of 24 applications, the task force denied the Town/TOECRA's $22.5 million Heritage Tourism District request. The Dr. Phillips Charities and P.E.C. requests advanced. ¹⁴
• The Town/TOECRA nevertheless presented to the task force on August 5, 2026 — the presentation this brief draws on — one day after the Town Council created the Heritage Tourism District by Resolution 2026-45.
• On August 11, 2026, the task force settled the list. Its written recommendations record two advancing motions: Recommendation 1 advanced the four highest-scoring county grant programs, and Recommendation 2 advanced Dr. Phillips Charities, Creative City Project, 8Waves/Children's Museum, Orange Audubon Society, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Florida Citrus Sports, City of Ocoee, and the Town of Eatonville CRA — carried with four no votes, recorded by name as Stefen Smith (District 6), Steve Sanford (Town of Oakland), Doug Gomer (City of Ocoee) and Vance Guthrie (City of Maitland). Twelve projects advanced in total. ¹⁷
• P.E.C.'s Hurston museum request did not advance. On the recording, the motion was "to move forward with Dr. Phillips and to refer the association to preserve the Eatonville community to ARC assuming they qualify, and then you will consider the CRA separately" — ARC being the county's TDT Application Review Committee grant program, a different and much smaller funding route than a direct capital recommendation. The Town of Eatonville CRA was then taken up on its own; a member moved "to move this project forward for consideration," and the motion passed. ¹⁶ (4:56:50, 7:01:54)
• On the task force's own scoring sheet, the three Eatonville-area applicants scored 2.1 (the museum applicant, listed there as "Dr. Phillips, Inc" — the same applicant the recommendations document calls Dr. Phillips Charities), 1.7 (P.E.C.) and 1.4 (Town of Eatonville CRA). The 2.1 and the 1.4 advanced; the 1.7 did not. Two other advancing projects also scored below P.E.C. — the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts at 1.6 and the City of Ocoee at 1.4. Score was not the whole of it. ¹⁸
  • Two separate applicants share the Dr. Phillips name on that sheet and are easy to mix up: Dr. Phillips, Inc / Dr. Phillips Charities is the Eatonville museum applicant (2.1), while the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts (1.6) is the separate downtown Orlando venue and a different request entirely. ^{17 18}
• The Orange County Board of County Commissioners was scheduled to make the final funding decisions on August 25, 2026. A task force recommendation is advice to the commissioners; nothing described here is money awarded. ^{15 17}

One further exchange is worth recording precisely, because it is easy to get wrong. During Q&A, a task force member raised a concern that "some of the items that were listed in the initial application may not be TDT eligible, which may … cause the project to fall up under that $20 million … TDT threshold." That was a conditional concern about an eligibility threshold, not a finding that anything had been cut. The Town's presenter answered that the "$22.5 million request is solely for TDT allowable expenses, which are brick and mortar," and that a "$7.5 million 25% match" had been deliberately separated from the ask. ⁷ (3:49:29, 3:50:02)

Part 2: The Coordination Question

More than one task force member asked why several Eatonville-area projects were coming forward without visible coordination between them. One member said the committee had "had a lot of really amazing presentations on Eatonville" and asked how the applicant felt about coordinating with the other groups; another asked whether the project conflicted with the other initiatives and how they might "work together and synergize." ⁷

The answers below all come from the Town of Eatonville / TOECRA presentation on August 5 — the same presentation, over about eight minutes. They are not a dispute between organizations; they are one applicant team describing the state of play.

On conflict with the other Eatonville proposals, CRA Executive Director Michael Johnson drew a line by project type: "our project has nothing to do with a museum. Absolutely nothing." The Eatonville request is for an indoor-outdoor auditorium and the restoration of the historic Club Eaton, not a museum. Asked whether the applicants had sought to collaborate, Johnson said: "no one reached out to the city for collaboration" — "the city" here meaning Eatonville, which is in fact a town. ⁷ (3:56:01)

Minutes later a representative of the Eatonville Chamber of Commerce, part of the same presenting team, described collaboration of a different kind — among Eatonville's own institutions rather than among the applicants: the Town, the CRA and the Chamber are "all working together collaboratively," an arrangement offered specifically to counter what the speaker called a "reputation of not working together." ⁷ (3:57:51)

Those two answers are not in conflict, and it is worth being precise about why: the CRA's Executive Director was describing whether the other applicants had approached the Town, while the Chamber's representative was describing how Eatonville's own four entities are working with each other. Read together they say the coordination that exists is internal to Eatonville, not among the three organizations asking the county for money.

Asked directly about N.Y. Nathiri, who leads P.E.C., and about the Hungerford property, the presenting team — the speaker here is not identified on the recording — said P.E.C. and the Town adopted a memorandum of understanding in 2021 to work together, and that talks had been held with Dr. Phillips and with State Representative Bruce Antone. On whether any of that amounted to a shared plan, the answer was plain: bringing something collective forward, "this is a total master plan that has not happened, but we look forward to the opportunities." ⁷ (3:58:31, 3:59:08)

Put plainly: on the applicants' own account there is a 2021 MOU between two of the three, talks with the others, and no joint application, no combined master plan, and three independently priced asks totalling $135.5 million submitted in the same cycle. Whether the 2021 MOU remains in force is not established in the record reviewed here.

Part 3: The Sunset Question

The Town/TOECRA presentation set aside time for the CRA's sunset. Greg Jackson — General Counsel to the Town of Eatonville Community Redevelopment Agency, and therefore counsel to the applicant — was invited up and told the task force he was answering a question he had heard "throughout the presentations": what happens when the CRA sunsets. He said any CRA-initiated projects would revert to the Town, and then went further:

He also told the task force, in the same answer, that "the town of Eatonville CRA does not sunset in 2027," and that on whether the CRA would sunset in 2027, "the short answer to that is no." A task force member later thanked him for "explaining what happens if the CRA sunsets." ⁷ (3:42:31–3:42:52)

The resolution he named is identifiable: Town of Eatonville Resolution 2025-12, adopted by the Town Council 4-1 on July 15, 2025. It is a Town Council resolution — distinct from CRA-R-2025-24, the CRA Board's own June 26, 2025 recommendation that preceded it. ^{9 10 13}

Resolution 2025-12 does extend the plan's life cycle to 2045, as Jackson said. Its title reads "EXTENDING THE LIFE CYCLE FOR 20 YEARS TO END 2045." But the same resolution does not treat that extension as self-executing. Its Section 3 attaches a condition:

The county instrument that Section 3 points to says the same thing from the other direction. Section 6 of Orange County Resolution 97-M-47 — the 1997 resolution that delegates redevelopment authority to Eatonville in the first place — is headed "Sunset Provision":

"The Board" is the Orange County Board of County Commissioners. ⁸

Put side by side:

• What the Town did: Resolution 2025-12 adopted the 2025 CRA Plan Update and extended its life cycle to 2045 — expressly conditioned, in Section 3, on Orange County adopting a Delegation of Authority Resolution. The packet cover sheet for the same item describes Council approval as allowing "the next step of seeking Orange County adoption through Interlocal Agreement and Delegation of Authority." ⁹
• What the county's delegating resolution requires: affirmative action by the Board of County Commissioners for the CRA's existence to continue past January 1, 2027. ⁸

So the two instruments agree with each other. What the answer to the task force left out is that the step they both name had not been taken — and six days later, Orange County's own staff told the same task force exactly that.

At the task force's August 11 meeting, as members weighed the Eatonville CRA's request, a county staff member stopped to correct the record on the sunset:

The co-chair added: "it's not that it wouldn't happen, but right now it's scheduled and no other decision has been made." ¹⁶ (6:58:20–6:59:05)

Asked minutes later whether Eatonville had requested an extension, the same staff member said it had, and that it is not alone: ¹⁶ (7:01:23)

That is the clearest public statement of where the Eatonville CRA stands: the request is in, the county has not acted on it, the January 1, 2027 date still governs, and the reason given for the county-wide pause is the unresolved state of property tax reform.

The plan document itself has not caught up either. The 2025 CRA Plan Update's financial-projections section still contains language written for the original 2027 sunset, projecting increment revenue "through 2027," and stating an intent to request an extension and a new formula "no more than 24 months prior to current 'sunset' date of 2027" — suggesting the section was not fully revised when the extension was adopted. ¹¹

One drafting note, so it is attributed to the right document: the well-known 2045/2047 discrepancy in this chain of instruments is not in Resolution 2025-12, which says 2045 throughout, and not in the plan update. It is in CRA-R-2025-24, the CRA Board's adopting resolution, whose title says December 31, 2045 while its operative clause says December 31, 2047. ¹³

What This Brief Does and Doesn't Establish

This brief documents three verified funding requests and what has happened to them so far, what task force members asked about coordination between them, and what an answer about the CRA's sunset did and didn't cover against the governing resolutions — the county's and the Town's.

It draws no conclusion about whether the CRA's authorization will lapse. That depends on whether the Board of County Commissioners takes the action Section 6 requires and Section 3 anticipates. As of August 12, 2026, county staff had said on the record that the county has not committed to it, and that Eatonville is one of several Orange County CRAs waiting on the same decision.

You don't have to take anyone's word for it — including ours. The meeting recording is linked below with timestamps for every quoted passage, and the resolutions are reproduced in the Cheatonville Library. Check them.