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Thursday's city commission meeting was the second time Winter Garden Mayor John Rees brought up putting a toll booth at the county line that separates the city from Lake County. The first time, at the May 14 city commission meeting, it sounded like the mayor was just freewheeling when he suggested turning Marsh Road into a toll road.
“If you live in Lake County, you’re going to have to pay because this is the City of Winter Garden’s road,” he said then as commissioners discussed a re-zoning variance for a community development project called Johns Lake Urban Village, which would drive still more traffic down Marsh Road.
The project traffic engineer had clocked 24,781 daily trips on Marsh Road in 2025 while noting that the new development would add an additional 5,411 daily trips, Planning Director Kelly Carson said Thursday during her presentation on the project to the commission.
The mayor added that cameras tracking eastbound traffic at the county line found that Lake County contributed another 8,211 daily trips on Marsh Road. He'd like to find a way to zero-out those trips.
So as commissioners weighed the traffic impact of another 613 homes plus a hotel and an events center coming with the new development, the mayor mentioned his toll booth again.
“I talked with the mayor of Clermont Monday and asked him if he heard about the toll booth. We need to get serious about figuring out how to slow that [traffic] down," Rees said, referring to Lake County traffic. "Because it’s putting all the pressure back here on our residents. We need to have a solution for that. Not that we don't like our friends in Lake County."
Winter Garden doesn’t have the ability to levy tolls, but the Central Florida Expressway Authority (CFX) does. Kurt Ardaman, the city attorney, told VoxPopuli, after Thursday’s commission meeting, that the city has “initiated conversations” with CFX about whether installing a toll booth is feasible and if so how that might be achieved.
“They’re willing to talk,” Ardaman said.
Asked if a tolling mechanism would be installed on Marsh Road or some other roadway, Ardaman said, “Every option is on the table.”
But CFX quickly slammed the brakes on that idea.
“CFX has no plans to toll local roads,” Brian Hutchings, CFX’s senior manager of community relations, told VoxPopuli in a Monday email. “As Central Florida's tolling authority, our focus is on providing regional relief through our existing and planned expressway network, including SR 429 and the new SR 516 Lake/Orange Connector, which will improve connectivity and traffic flow between Lake and Orange counties.”
