Flagler Beach’s South 6th Street will soon be the landing point for up to six of the 600-some transatlantic data cables that form the backbone of the internet. The cables will then snake underground, across State Road 100 and into Town center, where DX Blox, the Atlanta-based company, will build a “cable landing station,” or a data center, near the intersection of Town Center Boulevard and Royal Palms Parkway.
The Flagler Beach City Commission gave its final agreement to the company for an easement on 6th Street, after months of wrangling over what the company was willing to pay and where the landing points would be.
The initial offer from DC Blox was to pay the city just $100,000 per cable for the perpetual easement. The city found the amount too low. DC Blox eventually agreed to pay $200,000 per cable, and to pay the first $600,000 up front whether it ran three cables or not, with $200,000 per additional cable after that.
DC Blox and the city had also tussled over locations. Initially, the company was to have two landing point, one at South 6th Street, one at North 11th. The north landing point fell through. The 6th Street proposal drew objections from the city when the company wanted its landing point to be in the city-owned parking lot next to The Anchor restaurant. That would have prevented the city from using the site for anything but a parking lot.
The company then proposed running the landing site through Veterans Park. That would have entailed turning over a third of the park to the company as an easement, preventing city construction of monuments there, or other uses. The company finally agreed to run the cables through 6th Street, without encroaching on the parking lot.
Meanwhile Palm Coast and Flagler County officials applied strong pressure on Flagler Beach officials, in the background, to go along with DC Blox’s requests even in their first submittal, intimating that Flagler Beach was standing in the way of economic development. Flagler Beach officials stood firm and negotiated the deal more beneficial to their city, in open discussions. That has contrasted with Palm Coast and the county, where all negotiations with DC Blox have been secret, in compliance with a state law that allows companies and local governments to invoke a secrecy clause for ongoing economic development projects, though the clause is time-limited. Several FlaglerLive requests to meet with company officials were rebuffed. (See: “Company Planning Huge Data Center in Palm Coast for Undersea Internet Cables, But Flagler Beach Trips Over Easements.”)
The DC Blox data center in Town Center has never been discussed by Palm Coast City Council members in the open, while the administration has been mum about it, only saying privately that the project is moving ahead. DC Blox bought the acreage in Town center for $3.5 million a year ago.
The easement agreement in its final form came before the Flagler Beach City Commission at its Oct. 17 meeting, after undergoing its final edits. “I reviewed it and I had no issues with it,” City Attorney Drew Smith said. That’s all it took. Commissioners had no further questions. Unlike previous meetings, no one among the public addressed the commission, and DC Blox representatives were not there.
In any case, the commission was taking up the item almost five hours into an exhausting meeting, three hours of which had been spent on another, more visible major project, the Veranda Bay development along John Anderson Highway. Commission Chair Scott Spradley emphasized the word “unanimously” when the board approved the measure.
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