About 300 Lake Nona residents turned out at a public hearing Thursday night to tell the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority that they don’t want Orlando International Airport to encroach on their neighborhood in southeast Orlando.

The crowd was made up mainly of residents of the NorthLake Park at Lake Nona subdivision, which borders a two-square-mile tract of airport-owned land. They had responded to a campaign from a residents committee.

The aviation authority plans to expand the airport toward the east into an undeveloped area bordering houses and townhomes, and it’s proposing large-scale aviation uses that it considers key to its growth over the next decade. Residents are worried about noise, pollution, unsightly hangars and parking lots as well as traffic on surrounding roads and the impact on wildlife, even though aviation authority officials said they would “mitigate impacts” of construction.

” ‘Mitigate’ is a pretty word for ‘destroy,’ ” Deborah Moskowitz, leader of the residents committee, told the crowd at Lake Nona High School. “There is no question that the development as currently planned will have an adverse impact on the value of adjacent homes. This type of development is unquestionably not compatible with an adjacent residential area.”

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Residents near east Boggy Creek Road came to a County Commission meeting ready to protest a development of 20 or so houses in their rural north Osceola neighborhood.

Instead, they quickly found themselves facing a much bigger proposal — thanks in part to a growing medical city to the north in Orange County.

The representative for the landowners Monday night unveiled a proposal for two mixed-use projects of medical offices, shops and residences on the 110 acres.

Residents were caught off-guard.

“Common people don’t have a say in this process,” resident Don Bova said. “They [commissioners] knew about the change, but we didn’t. This is not what was advertised for the public hearing. How are we supposed to prepare?”

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