County Commissioner Emily Bonilla, who represents some of the eastern parts of the county, threw out a series of conditions for her support of the tax increase, including no new toll roads and no corporate welfare. “All mass transit should be free to use. Sunrail doesn’t do a great job of checking people for their tickets, and Lynx is not easily accessible due to the limited ways they accept payments…. If the taxpayers are paying for it anyway, they should ride for free,” Bonilla told her fellow commissioners. “No new revenues from this tax will go towards impacts creating the need for more capacity by any new developments. Those developments should be required to pay for their impacts, not the taxpayers.”

Commissioner Emily Bonilla expressed several concerns at the work session Tuesday, asking also why Tourist Development Tax dollars (TDT funds) can’t help with this issue. “If we are looking for a tourist to pay 51% of this tax, why doesn’t this board support using the TDT tax for transportation?” Bonilla asked at the meeting.

Commissioner Emily Bonilla, who voted against the incentives, wanted to place additional requirements on the county incentives to require job creation milestones and other indicators to track progress, but her ideas weren’t used. Any changes to the agreement would have required going back to negotiate with Universal.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and the Board of County Commissioners have begun a series of public townhalls, including one this past week with Commissioner Emily Bonilla, to obtain feedback from residents on a path forward. It is exciting to see our community come together now to talk not only about transportation problems, but also finding solutions for issues that face our community today, in hopes of building a better community for tomorrow.

Also supporting the concept for a redesign of the Corrine corridor is Orange County Commissioner Emily Bonilla. “It exceeded my expectations,” Bonilla said. “I’m very happy with it.”