The New Park on Seidel Road Skipped the Parking Lot, and That Was the Whole Idea

On the morning of August 31, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings went down a slide. District 1 Commissioner Nicole Wilson took a turn on the swings. Panther Lake Elementary's principal and assistant principal stood nearby, along with a handful of West Orange Chamber of Commerce ambassadors and a woman named Erin Huntley, walking her dog Liberty along the park's still-fresh paved path. That was the entire ribbon-cutting for Watermark Park, a 5.69-acre, $1.8 million project at 9940 Seidel Road, built where Summerlake Groves Street meets Seidel Road, directly across from the elementary school.

It became Orange County's 115th park that day, and the modest scale of the opening was not an accident. Watermark Park has no parking lot. It has no restrooms. The absence of a parking lot makes proximity an important part of visiting.

A park built for feet, not cars

Demings addressed the gap directly at the ribbon cutting, telling the crowd the county would work through those issues over time and naming exactly what the space is meant to be: "a walk-up park, a shared space with our school here."

That framing carries more weight here than it would in most Central Florida suburbs, because Horizon West was not assembled block by block the way most subdivisions grow. Orange County drew the whole area up as a master plan in 1995, organized into five walkable villages around a shared town center, built on land that had been citrus groves until a run of hard freezes in the 1980s wiped them out. A park with no parking lot is not a budget shortcut inside that plan. It is what a village-scale commons is supposed to look like on paper, decades before the county actually got around to building this particular corner of it.

How that village-scale vision works in practice depends on how the park fits into the surrounding neighborhoods.

How Watermark Park connects to Summerlake

Summerlake Groves Street runs along one edge of the new park, which puts Summerlake on the map for this project in a literal, on-the-ground sense. But the park's mailing address sits with Watermark, directly across Seidel Road, and Lakeshore is closer still, about 0.15 miles from the entrance. Summerlake also has its own elementary school inside the community, on Summerlake Park Boulevard, entirely separate from Panther Lake Elementary across the street from the new park.

A household near the Groves Street side of Summerlake has a genuine, short walk to a dog park built for both small and large breeds, shaded playgrounds split for ages two to five and five to twelve, a perimeter walking path, and a pavilion. A household on the far side of the community, past Summerlake's own school and clubhouse, is looking at a drive to reach a park explicitly designed around the assumption that nobody drives there.

That split matters for access to the park. Watermark Park is a walk-up amenity, and the distance to it varies across Summerlake.

The other park, built for the opposite trip

Orange County is not applying that walk-up logic everywhere. About a mile north, at Hamlin Groves Trail, the 215-acre Horizon West Regional Park reopened its first phase in February 2026 with two paved parking lots holding 165 spaces between them. Parks and Recreation manager Kyle Kent broke ground on the park's next phase in June, describing an addition that will bring a splash pad, a floating dock and kayak launch on Lake Hartley, and utility hookups for a farmers market, along with more parking and a third picnic shelter. Kent has described the finished version of the park as something close to Disney World without having to go there, with sports fields, pickleball courts, a botanical garden and a dog park still planned for later phases.

Kent has said individual construction steps at the regional park typically take about 180 days once they begin, though county officials have separately put the full completion of this next phase at 2027 or 2028. The splash pad and kayak launch, in other words, belong to next year's calendar more than this one.

Set the two projects side by side and the county's approach comes into focus. Horizon West Regional Park is the destination residents drive to, with room to park once they get there. Watermark Park is the commons residents are supposed to already live inside of. Summerlake sits close enough to touch both without being squarely inside either.

The intersection wearing the neighborhood's name

Watermark Park is not the only construction Summerlake households are working around this fall. A few miles south, at the intersection of Ficquette Road, Reams Road and Summerlake Park Boulevard, Orange County is roughly eight months into a two-year project to widen Ficquette Road from two lanes to four and replace the intersection's old S-curve and traffic signal with a roundabout. One driver who crosses that stretch regularly for work told Spectrum News 13 he had once been stuck there for 20 to 25 minutes, and now builds an extra 15 to 20 minutes of buffer into any trip that passes through it. County figures put daily traffic on that corridor at roughly 22,000 vehicles, up from about 17,000 in 2019.

Construction began in the first quarter of 2026 and is expected to run about two years, which puts the finished roundabout closer to early 2028 than to this school year. Until then, the intersection carrying Summerlake's own name in its official title is also the one most likely to add unplanned minutes to a school run or a Saturday trip to Publix.

Seidel Road itself, the street the new park fronts, has had its own construction stretch this year too, tied to the separate State Road 516 toll corridor project, which brought overnight detours to Seidel and Avalon roads in the spring.

Why three projects landed in one year

None of this is happening because Summerlake was singled out. Unincorporated Horizon West grew from an estimated 46,200 residents at the 2020 census to about 73,300 in 2026, and the county has been trying to add parks and widen roads fast enough to keep pace with that growth. Watermark Park, the Ficquette roundabout and the next phase at Horizon West Regional Park are three separate answers to the same pressure, arriving within the same twelve months and within a couple of miles of each other.

For a household in Summerlake trying to make sense of all three at once this fall, the practical read is straightforward. Check whether the walk from home to Summerlake Groves Street and Seidel Road is a genuinely easy one before treating Watermark Park as a neighborhood amenity rather than a nearby one. Expect delays around Reams Road and Summerlake Park Boulevard to continue well into 2028. And if the splash pad and kayak launch are the draw, that trip belongs to next year, not this one.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your specific block in Summerlake, whether that's the walk to Watermark Park, the drive around the Ficquette construction, or just how the neighborhood is shaping up this year, Mary Rossi Team knows this stretch of Horizon West well enough to talk it through in plain terms. Get in touch anytime.