OCOEE, Fla. — The Ocoee City Commission on Tuesday unanimously approved changes to the city's comprehensive plan and rezoning of land in the southeast corner of the intersection of Ocoee Apopka Road and Fullers Cross Road to allow a developer to build a youth sports and hotels project valued at up to a billion dollars.

The vote changed 117.7 acres of low-density residential property and 32.3 acres of conservation property to commercial.

The project, called The Dynasty, calls for up to 17 convertible, multipurpose sports fields, including a football field; a 150,000-square-foot state-of-the-art indoor sports facility, over 1,000 on-site hotel rooms, 350,000 square feet of retail, dining entertainment venues, a riverwalk and parking garages.

The company seeking approval of the project, Montierre Development, expressed their appreciation and excitement about moving forward with the project. 

"We are beyond grateful to the City of Ocoee and its residents for their continued support of The Dynasty|Ocoee project," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. "We look forward to the positive impacts our project will bring to not only to the city residents and visitors, but to the entire vivacious world of youth sports."  

At Tuesday's second reading, a Montierre spokesperson said the company expects the project to create up to 10,000 construction jobs and, upon completion of the project, up to 5,000 direct and indirect jobs in the area.

Residents who commented on the project mostly were in favor, but at least, who has a farm that backs up to the project, expressed concerns about whether barriers would be set up to close it off from his property and wanted to know whether access points would be available to his property once the roadways for the sports complex were built.

A Montierre spokesperson said the company would work to address any outstanding concerns, including monitoring and containment of a brownfield area of the property. A brownfield is previously developed property that has been abandoned or underdeveloped. In this case, Chevron previously had owned part of the property and had to conduct some Environmental Protection Agency-mandated soil cleanup and groundwater monitoring and containment because of hazardous substances left behind.