OCALA, FL (352today.com) – A draft of the City of Ocala‘s Vision 2050 was presented by staff before the Ocala City Council at a workshop on Feb. 10, 2026. Within the next few weeks a public hearing regarding Vision 2025, will be held by the municipality’s planning and zoning commission, and will most likely go before council in May.
This is a calibration of Vision 2035, said Pete Lee, City of Ocala city manager.
“This is the most important toolbox that we’ve had over my career. It’s really allowed us to go beyond and have implementation strategies and identify the things that we need to do to continue to be the kind of community, community-wide that we want to be, and to set our priorities and to get those things done,” said Lee.
Questions to be answered
What will Ocala look like 25 years from now? Where is the development going? Where is it happening? What type of development? What is the city’s population going to be? What are the demographics going to look like? How is the city’s ability to govern impacted by further state preemptions and mandates? Will there be passenger service at the airport? It’s hard to come up with a clear picture of what that’s going to look like, said Jeff Shrum, City of Ocala growth services manager. Vision 2035 provided a real blueprint of how to move forward.
“What is important for the vision is that it provides the guidance and the blueprint for how do we get to the future that we want,” said Shrum.
What does that look like for Ocala 2050? It’s going to be shaped by Vision 2050 and the visions and the actions that Ocala City Council makes moving forward, said Shrum. It is in draft form so there is the ability to make some modifications.
The draft included the story of the vision, discussing Vision 2035, it’s evolution and its impact on Vision 2050, said Aubrey Hale, City of Ocala planning director. The draft itself looked at the citywide initiatives and focus areas.
As city staff went through the community effort, SR 40 became a primary corridor that would link a number of areas in the city together, so that became a big focus area.
Importance and organization
The high priorities in the draft are things that the city would like to achieve in the next five years, said Hale. Future considerations would be a six-to-10-year period, where city staff will be targeting some of the improvements and implementation actions. Things weren’t identified specifically for those items that were 11 to 15 years out. The vision will need to be updated in 10 to 15 years as there will be a lot of calibrations that will continue to happen.
Urban form opportunities are areas where they’re centered around the city’s medium intensity districts and how they are to be further calibrated in those special districts to create an area of higher intensity, possibly shifting away from more of the Euclidean conventional zoning approaches that are more worried about compatibility of uses and shifting closely to form base code, which is something the downtown possesses, but it will be a more context-driven form base code, said Hale.
Vision 2035 started at the peak of the economic downturn and that’s when the city had the ability to look at itself and understand the impacts that came as a result. Among the concerns were how the city could better diversify itself economically. The vision that came about was that Ocala is a great place to live, play and prosper. From that, Vision 2050 strives to continue and further refine the 2035 vision, and maintain the City of Ocala as an inviting community, with a diverse economic base, unique neighborhoods, and a vibrant and innovative urban center, said Hale.
Ocala 2035 established vision principles, wherein the city tried to leverage the assets that they have more effectively, but also recognizing downtown as an economic vibrant hub and that the City of Ocala is the county seat and the driver for the Marion County area, said Hale.
The heat map which came out of Vision 2035, which began to lay the foundation and the groundwork of what the city’s comprehensive plan would be and how the city would make some of those modifications. While going through the Vision 2035 process, staff initially had 13 land use categories through the vision and its guidance, those were consolidated down to six, and those six are focusing on higher levels of intensity and where those are appropriate, where neighborhoods are located. It encapsulated gateways, complete street corridors, trails and other transit corridors throughout this vision plan.
Another critical piece of Vision 2035 was that it was a community driven process, there was a lot of outreach gathering a lot of information in the process, and it was the same way that city staff approached Vision 2050. They reached out to focus groups and organizations, reaching more than 1000 people during the process, said Hale.
The comprehensive plan was a major change in the consolidation of land use categories, was also completed. The form base code was created in 2018, which encompasses the majority of the downtown community redevelopment area.
Reaching objectives
Section Two of Vision 2050 focuses on bringing the vision to life. Several long-term goals were accomplished through the 2035 vision and will help guide the city’s future as they move toward Vision 2050, said Endira Madraveren, City of Ocala chief planning official. Until sunset it’s important to leverage the funding opportunities for projects including the redevelopment of downtown North Magnolia as well as streetscape opportunities along major corridors as the city continues to advance the activation of West Ocala through the redevelopment of brownfield sites including the Mary Sue Rich Community Center at Reed Place.
The process of gathering community feedback focused on broad inclusive participation from community members, business owners and stakeholders. The feedback from all four of the communitywide summits captured a wide range of perspectives and community priorities, said Madraveren. City staff led 23 outreach sessions to strategic community groups and individual city departments, which helped to build a consensus and guide staff to a long-term implementation of Vision 2050.
Kimley-Horn was the primary consultant on the project, and the city did reach out to Urban3, who was a self-consultant on the vision, the city incorporated that into the vision. Urban3 is a firm that specializes in land value economics and evidence-base community design. Among the things that were looked at was the land value per acre, which are fairly consistent, however, SR 200 and some of the city’s established historic neighborhoods in the Southeast have a higher land value per acre. There was also a calculation for the city’s vacant lands which showed that about 11% of the property within the city limits are vacant or undeveloped properties.
One of the items that received a closer look was taxable versus exempt, said Hale. It showed 77 percent for taxable 23 percent for exempt and that’s generally equal for a lot of the communities, there’s going to be some that the city can’t do anything with, they’re going to be exempt, schools, the airport and other government facilities.
Key infrastructure, and analysis was done on the roads, water, sewer and stormwater, looking at the length of miles, the current spending and life cycle costs.
Focus on the future
The population projections for 2050 indicate that the population will grow by nearly 31 percent by the year 2050, based on the city’s current 2024 population estimates, which means the population would be growing by about 92,000.
Ocala 2035 Vision had three main priorities, said Madraveren. The urban form and open space, mobility and community connectivity and building and site design. With Vision 2050, staff wanted to adjust those with their changing needs.
City staff decided on four building blocks that will guide growth into 2050, said Madraveren. Those were land use and housing, mobility and connectivity, public and open spaces. These building blocks were used to generate citywide initiatives. Vision 2050 is further defined into focus areas and opportunities for catalytic development and redevelopment.
Urban form are opportunities within the city that the municipality can look at to encourage more dense development in different areas, following up on the Urban3 analysis, on how Ocala can expand its downtown approach to some of these other areas to generate higher ad valorem throughout the city, said Hale.
The QR code will take you to a website that has all of the information pertaining to the vision and any of the other plans associated with the vision and helps them understand the reason that the city is doing the things that they’re doing.
