A-1 Block Corporation of Orlando will build and open a 55,000-square-foot concrete-block manufacturing plant on 25 acres just north of the County Fairgrounds off Sawgrass Road.
The Flagler County Planning Board approved the project’s site plan last week. The site was formerly residential and used to board horses. It is currently categorized as pastureland. It was rezoned. It is bordered by industrial land to the north. There are no residential parcels on Sawgrass anymore.
An 1,800-square foot residence will be converted into an office building. Four new buildings will be built: a 27,000-square-foot block manufacturing plant, a 15,000-square-foot machinery-repair shop, a 12,000-square-foot truck-repair facility, and a second 600-squerfoot office building. Several areas to the east of the plan will be devoted to block storage.
The site is connected to no utilities–no water, no sewer. It will draw its water from wells and discharge into septic tanks. Stormwater runoff will be collected and treated on site.
The buildings, Adam Mengel, the county’s planning director, said, will be “pushed to the east side of the site, so away from the roadway itself, away from Sawgrass, closer to the railroad tracks that are along the east side, hopefully in an area also where that’s not going to conflict with any activities we have going on the fairgrounds. That was one of our concerns with this.”
The manufacturing plant is in close proximity to the arena at the fairgrounds. Mengel said that the way the buildings will be situated, “those are going to be acting as a buffer. You also do have a landscape buffer that is proposed along the south boundary. Not much, but it’s enough to be able to hopefully provide at least some visual barrier that’s there.”
“We’ve tried to centralize the actual industrial use more toward the north side of the site,” Chris Ralph, the project engineer, told the planning board.
If the plant will generate noise that would be audible at the fairgrounds, “there are industrial performance standards, they have to meet those,” which includes noise standards, Mengel said. The company has not yet submitted building plans. Company officials could not be reached before this article initially published.
A-1 Block Corporation has been has been a family business for 65 years, according to its website, with eight operations in Central Florida. The Flagler County plant would follow additions in Sanford in 2018, Plant City in 2016 and Polk County in 2015.
