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At the end of March the local subsidiary of DC Blox, a data center company based in Atlanta, asked Flagler Beach for permission to have two landing spots for undersea cables in the city. The company is planning a still-secret data center in Palm Coast’s Town Center.
One of the landing spots would be the right of way along 11 th Street, with groundings on the property of Santa Maria del Mar Catholic Church’s parking lot. The city commission had no objection. The other was to be on a city-owned seaside parking lot on State Road A1A at South 6th Street. The city objected, as the landing infrastructure, however small, could foreclose on the city’s use of that lot for something other than a parking lot in the future. (See: “Company Planning Huge Data Center in Palm Coast for Undersea Internet Cables, But Flagler Beach Trips Over Easements.”)
The city is also hesitant about the paltry, one-time sum the company was willing to pay for each cable landing: $100,000. The company plans up to four cables at each of the two locations.
The 6th Street proposal died. As an alternative, the company–its Florida subsidiary is called DC Orchid–is now proposing to run its landing site through the north side of Veterans Park in the heart of the city, limit the footprint of the infrastructure both in its permanent state and during construction, every time a cable is added, and lift the $100,000 cap on what the company was willing to pay.
The proposal was to go before the Flagler Beach City Commission Thursday evening. DC Blox asked for the item to be pulled so as not to risk it being again shot down as the city continues to do its due diligence on the matter, Commission Chairman Scott Spradley said. But the city may eventually be more receptive to that proposal.
DC Blox held closed-door meetings with the commissioners individually after the initial presentation before the commission did not go well. Palm Coast and county officials have also been pressuring some Flagler Beach officials to go along. The DC Blox/Orchid project would bring a handful of jobs to Town Center through the data center.
Palm Coast and the county are being secretive about it because the company will be seeking tax incentives under a legal provision that allows local governments and private companies to keep their dealings secret for 12 to 24 months, despite the tax dollars involved. The company doesn’t have to keep its dealings secret. But once it invokes secrecy under the law’s provision, the local governments are enjoined from discussing anything about it.
Flagler Beach is not part of that incentive package. DC Blox is negotiating with the city separately, and openly. But the landing spots along the shore are essential if the data center in Palm Coast is to function.
Still, the secrecy on the city’s and county’s part is ironic–and hypocritical, if the company’s own words are to be taken at face value: “Transparent communication is vital,” the company wrote in its memo to Flagler Beach officials. “DC BLOX will keep the City Council and appropriate city staff informed throughout the project, addressing any concerns.” The company has lived up to that only as far as Flagler Beach officials are concerned, at times inaccurately telling elected officials that they could not share the documents they were receiving from the company (if commissioners complied, they’d be violating the open-record law) and misusing the word “appropriate,” as if to suggest that the public should be excluded from that transparency.
Meanwhile, the Palm Coast City Council has yet to openly acknowledge, let alone discuss, the existence of the project, its impact on the city, or what taxpayers will be asked to pay as their share of “incentives.”
DC Blox paid $3.5 million for a 34-acre parcel in Town Center, on the west side of Town Center Boulevard, to build its data center. That center will “not only serve as a landing site for subsea cables,” DC Blox wrote city commissioners in March, in a memo, “but also house a secure, open-access data center. This facility will attract various telecommunications companies and internet service providers, fostering a competitive marketplace for high-speed connectivity.” The project is expected to create “a small number of high-paying jobs, attract new businesses, and help diversify the local economy.”
“My understanding is it would be a footprint not much more than a manhole cover in an obscure part of the park, so that wouldn’t be an issue,” Spradley said. But the construction timeline is an issue, as it could interfere with events at the park and with other major construction projects in the city, one of which–the rebuilding of beaches and dunes from North 7th Street to the northern border of Gamble Rogers State Recreation Area–is to use Veterans Park as a staging ground for a few months starting in a matter of weeks. But the company is pledging not to start construction on the Veterans Park vault until the beach renourishment is completed. That means not before March 2025.
Undersea data cables are the backbone of the internet. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. Companies like DC Blox don’t own or operate the cables. Companies like Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook, do. They lay them down, repair them when they break, and pay for their upkeep. But the cables have to land somewhere and be routed. That’s where DC Blox comes in. Each subsea cable is routed into a beach manhole, or a concrete vault underground that serves as the gathering point for the disparate cables. That’s the vault DC Blox wants to build in Veterans Park, though every time a new cable is added, it would require additional construction lasting two to four weeks.
Initial construction would take nine to 12 months. That length worries city officials.
The cabling system is then to be connected to the data center in Town Center, going underground along State Road 100, Old Kings Road, I-05 and other rights of way, as well as following the Leheigh Trail.
According to renderings the company submitted to the city, the Veterans Park plan would have the four undersea cables landing beneath the beach along the north edge of the park, along State Road 100. The northern third of the park would be closed for construction. Visible infrastructure would all be at the northwestern corner of the park and the sidewalk, along the parking area and South Central Avenue, with an electric box rising just inside the park’s perimeter. The permanent easement would encompass roughly a quarter of the park.
It’s not a minor ask, which is why the city balked when the company offered the $100,000 per cable, and nothing after that. “That was their offer. It has not been accepted yet,” Spradley, a lawyer, said. He took the offer as just that: as the beginning of a negotiation. “There’s different ways to do a deal,” he said, noting that City Manager Dale Martin was doing just that at the moment, along with other due diligence aspects of the proposal. The city, he said, could ask for a lease arrangement with recurring payments, it could ask for a higher one-time payment, or it could ask for other compensation methods.
It isn’t clear, for example, why the city is not asking for the same arrangement that attaches to cell towers on public property: the local government gets a share of each carrier’s lease payments to the tower company. The companies that own the undersea cables are paying DC Blox for its service. The city could similarly require that a percentage share of that be the city’s.
Given the company’s commitment to the Palm Coast data center location and the expected taxpayer subsidies it will receive at that end, Flagler Beach should be in a strong position to be neither servile nor to give the impression that its sandals are all hayseed.
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