Extension to include 10- to 14-foot wide shared-use path, boardwalk section
Orange County staff and local community members celebrated the groundbreaking for the $10-million second phase of the Lake Apopka Connector Trail that will connect two existing trails—West Orange Trail along McCormick Road and Lake Apopka Loop Trail in Magnolia Park, Apopka.
The groundbreaking happened on Wednesday, Feb. 19, at the Orange County Utilities North West Water Reclamation Facility on West McCormick Road in Apopka.
The second phase’s construction will create 3.23 miles of a shared-use path and differ between 10 to 14 feet in width to accommodate both bicyclists and pedestrians. Amenities will include two rest areas, fences, gates, and bicycle/pedestrian picket railing, and a 100-foot boardwalk section in the Northwest Orange Water Reclamation Facility.
The finished Connector Trail is scheduled to open to the public by March 2026, according to a December 2024 news release from Orange County.
Two portions of the Connector Trail now open to the public were previously completed as part of the Oak Pointe North and Wynwood developments.
“I’m excited for our community because of what the trails mean to our community,” Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings said during remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony. “It’s part of making our community the community that it can be, and these beautiful trails are crucial to preserving the local ecosystem by providing access to our diverse natural landscapes and connecting nearby communities.”
Over 30 years ago, the first segment of the West Orange Trail opened. Since then, the West Orange Trail has been expanded and now stretches 22 miles through Oakland, Winter Garden, Apopka and Ocoee, Demings said.
The concept of a multi-modal path surrounding Lake Apopka goes back about 20 years, Demings said. In 2012, phase 1 opened to provide access from Magnolia Park to the Lake Apopka North Shore Trail, maintained by the St. Johns River Water Management District.
No trail would have been built if Lake Apopka was still in the polluted condition it used to be in, said Orange County District 2 Commissioner Christine Moore. Lake Apopka was once deemed as the state’s most polluted lake due to the runoffs from the lake’s farms on its north shore.
“If you had seen this lake in the 1970s, it was brown. It was green. And … we had white alligators. It was just a terrible situation,” Moore said. “So today really is a celebration of what we’ve all been doing since the 1990s to restore this lake, and just think about where we’re going to be, where we have people coming from all over the world to ride the Coast-to-Coast Trail, and now they’re going to have the opportunity to take this 40-mile ride all the way around Lake Apopka.”
Former Orange County District 1 Commissioner Betsy VanderLey said the Connector Trail phase 2 groundbreaking is the fruition of her late father’s dream.
When Jon VanderLey was Oakland mayor in the late 1990s, Friends of Lake Apopka and Oakland Nature Preserve were forming, and the West Orange Trail in Oakland was under construction. Friends of Lake Apopka is the citizen advocacy group committed to Lake Apopka’s restoration.
When Betsy VanderLey chaired MetroPlan Orlando, Joe Dunn of Friends of Lake Apopka approached her with the concept of the Lake Apopka Loop Trail. She recalled her father discussing the same vision.
“If you stop and think about Commissioner Moore’s comments about what the lake looked like at that point in time and what it looks like now, for him (Jon VanderLey) to have that vision of a Lake Apopka Loop Trail and that being an amenity was quite a stretch of imagination at that point in time,” she said. “So happily, I got to find myself in a position of leadership to help secure some of the land, to complete that loop trail and find some of the funding to complete that loop trail.”
VanderLey said she does not often come to groundbreakings, since she is no longer in office, but Wednesday was different.
“I wouldn’t want to have missed this one,” she said. “This is really a fruition of my dad’s dream and the fact that I got to take a part in that.”
