"I walk in, look at these boards, and thought: ‘Woah, wait a minute, that’s going through my dining room.’"
Becky Burke first learned of the Central Florida Expressway Authority’s plans to build a toll road through the middle of her late-19th century home when she looked at a set of maps pinned on a board at a public meeting last April.
“I walk in, look at these boards, and thought: ‘Woah, wait a minute, that’s going through my dining room,’” she said this week.
Adam Shafran, who lives across unpaved Bloom Lane from Burke’s property in a rural pocket of Seminole County, learned from a friend the roadway would cut through his house and nursery of exotic fruit trees.
“I’ve lost a lot of sleep,” Shafran said. “I’ve got agitation. I’ve got anxiety. I’ve got visions of bulldozers and trees being cut down.”
Like many nearby residents, Burke and Shafran don’t want to leave the quiet wooded area of large lots tucked just north of Lake Jesup, where they’ve lived for decades.
But they know they’ll have little choice if the toll road agency — known as CFX — moves forward with its years-long plans to build a two-lane connector road between State Road 417 and the Orlando Sanford International Airport.
Read more at the Orlando Sentinel