by Linda Charlton
The first of two Victory Pointe lawsuits has survived a major legal challenge and appears headed for trial. In that lawsuit, filed in May of 2017, Stephen Sprinkles alleges that the City of Clermont took part of his property, without consulting him, to build a portion of the Victory Pointe stormwater system. Last October the City challenged that claim with a motion for summary judgment. The plaintiff, through attorney Edward Jordan, then filed his own motion for summary judgment.
A statement released by city communications director Kathryn Deen states that “Recently the court denied competing motions for summary disposition of the matter. The city is confident that it will prevail on all issues at an upcoming trial. To date, the trial has not yet been scheduled. ”
The dueling motions were heard in court on April 15 before judge Richard Singletary. Singletary has since retired, but on the last day of July, he came out of retirement long enough to issue orders that denied both parties’ motions. The orders are brief, basically just saying ‘motion denied.’ They were recorded August 5, and later that day attorney Jordan filed his motion for a non-jury trial.
Jordan declined to comment on the case.
Attorney Leonard Baird accurately predicted the judge’s orders during the hearing in April, when he said: “From what we’ve heard in this two and a half-hour hearing, the only person who should be getting a summary judgment is Jimmie Harned.”
Harned is one of several secondary defendants named in the Sprinkles suit. The additional defendants are mainly owners of adjacent properties. The lawsuit alleges that if Sprinkles is not found to be the owner of the disputed West Lake “submerged lands,” that Sprinkles has a claim to the property of a couple of those adjacent property owners, Harned being one of them.
The disputed property is south of Minneola Avenue, under Victory Pointe Pond 1A. Sprinkles claims the eastern portion. The plaintiff in the second lawsuit, Jo-El, LLC, claims the western portion. The second lawsuit is currently in the mediation phase. Neither Sprinkles nor Jo-El is challenging ownership of the middle portion of the pond.
The Victory Pointe stormwater ponds, collectively, occupy the area that was once West Lake. The basic fact underlying the legal disputes is that between the first Clermont plat in 1884 and today, West Lake disappeared. In 1884 it was a nine-acre lake. By the time the current plat was done in 1926, the lake was noticeably smaller, there was a road across it (Minneola Avenue) and there appeared to be no open water south of the road. By the time the Victory Pointe project was launched, some 90 years later, there was no lake at all. In 2012 at the direction of the state’s department of revenue, all the platted lakes without parcel ID numbers were assigned numbers by the various county property appraisers. That’s how the non-existent lake got its own parcel ID. As a default, the property appraisers listed the State of Florida as owning the newly numbered lakes.
A couple of years later city officials in Clermont realized that the state did not really own West Lake, and convinced officials on the property appraiser’s office to change the listed owner of the lake from the state to the city, based on the 1926 plat.
The apparent lack of open water south of Minneola Avenue in the 1926 plat did lead to one rather odd stretch of arguments during the April 15 hearing. There were no expert witnesses present at that hearing, but plaintiff attorney Jordan did introduce the written testimony (transcribed deposition) of his expert witness, Kimberly Buchheit. She spoke at length about the doctrine of reliction: namely, that when the lake receded the new dry land became the property of the adjacent landowners. Apparently unaware of the 1884 plat, Buchheit had indicated, under questioning, that she did not believe that West Lake ever extended south of Minneola Avenue, but that if it had, it would be subject to the doctrine of reliction.
Seizing on the ‘nothing south of the road’ part, attorney John T. Conner, representing the city, argued that since there was never a lake south of Minneola Avenue, the doctrine of reliction could not apply, and that if attorney Jordan wanted to argue that the plat was wrong, he needed to follow steps laid out in Florida statutes to address the problem. Jordan’s counter was that by saying there was no lake there, Conner was in effect stipulating that the plat was wrong.
More to come; the saga isn’t over.
Linda Charlton is a freelance writer/musician/photographer based in south Lake County. Her favorite hobby is unraveling mysteries.
