Ryan Lynch – Staff Writer, Orlando Business Journal
May 20, 2021

The Florida Department of Transportation has plenty of road work slated for Lake County in the coming years.

FDOT has plans for 31 future projects within the county, ranging from road construction to traffic studies and trail creation for bikes.

For the 23 projects that have a cost estimate available for construction, those total roughly $200 million.

Among those, these are the five largest by construction cost are:

  • $61.4 million: Widening State Road 19 from two lanes to four lanes from County Road 48 to CR 561 over 4.76 miles between Howey-in-the-Hills and Tavares. It also would add a bridge over Little Lake Harris as well as pedestrian improvements. The project is currently in the design phase.
  • $26.5 million: Reconstructing the existing two-lane SR 44 into a divided four-lane road on 2.09 miles north of Mount Dora. The project is in the design phase.
  • $19.3 million: Widening SR 500/U.S. Highway 441 into a six-lane divided urban roadway from north of SR 46 to SR 44/Donnelly Street near Mount Dora. The existing setup is a four-lane divided roadway and the project is in the design phase.
  • $17 million: A new four-lane truck route realignment of State Road 50 is in the design phase. The project would span 2.096 miles.
  • $16 million: Resurfacing SR 44 over a span of 5.98 miles from east of SR 35 to the Lake County line near Wildwood. The project is in design currently.

Timetables for the projects above were not listed. Projects usually wait until they have funding secured before setting an official construction date.

Those proposed projects come as total construction volume in Orlando is expected to go up by 2.7% in 2021 after a down year in 2020, according to a first quarter 2021 report by construction consultant Cumming Corp. “Overall, while 2021 is expected to be a rebound year for Orlando, the first quarter is expected to be flat before the uptick starts in the second quarter; the boost will occur in the third quarter onwards,” the report stated.

When it comes to infrastructure construction spending, Orlando went down 3.4% from $3.4 billion in 2019 to $3.29 billion in 2020. In 2021, Cumming projected another drop of 4.5% to $3.14 billion before a projected rise of 10.7% to roughly $3.48 billion in 2022.