The Palm Coast Planning Board on Wednesday approved the master plan for Matanzas Park, a 104-house subdivision in Palm Coast’s L-Section. The subdivision will fill a 26-acre rectangle–if not almost a square–rimmed by Londonderry, London and Longfellow drives, all of which are built up, with houses abutting the subdivision’s property. Some 40 percent of the acreage in the proposed subdivision is wetlands, which will be eliminated but for a pond in the middle of the site.
The board raised some cautions about potential flooding in and around the subdivision.
The future subdivision, an active-adult, senior community, is half a mile from the intersection of Matanzas Woods Parkway and Lakeview Boulevard, parallel with one of the large Sawmill subdivisions across U.S. 1. The land is surrounded by single-family homes except for conservation and vast tracts of unbuilt land south of Matanzas Woods Parkway, land that’s part of the Palm Coast Park development of regional impact. When the city inherited the property from the county 25 years ago, the site was zoned for apartments. The City Council at the landowner’s request rezoned the land to single-family residential in 2023.
The 104 single-family homes will be built on 50-foot-wide lots. “Buffers against the residential adjacent land uses and zoning are not required,” Estelle Lens, senior planner with the city, said, but the developer “is preserving trees along the perimeter of the project, and they’ll be landscaping the entrances in the amenity area. The developer is Robert Gazzoli of Matanzas Park LLC, with the Jacksonville-based Alliant Engineering Group as the project engineer.
Alliant’s traffic study concluded that when completed and occupied, the new houses will generate 448 additional daily trips by cars on neighboring streets and roads. Road capacity is not expected to suffer.
Its 15 acres of pine flatwoods were previously used for silviculture. But since those pines were last harvested, the site has sat fallow, growing slash pines, live oaks and loblolly bay with an undergrowth of palmetto. There are some wetlands on the property. “The proposed project will directly impact approximately 11.02 acres of federally jurisdictional wetlands,” an ecological assessment of the development states.
By “impact,” the analysis means eliminate: “Due to the location, size, and geometry of [the wetland] it was determined avoidance and minimization was not possible of this wetland. The wetland is located within the center of the subject property and avoidance or minimization could not be completed given the site design requirements for ingress/egress, stormwater management structures, and infrastructure size.”
The developer will buy 5.14 wetland mitigation credits from the Fish Tail Wetland Mitigation Bank, a 5,387-acre reserve in the Pellicer Creek and Matanzas River basin, where the bank either restores or maintains wetlands in perpetuity. A credit is roughly worth $100,000. Credits are based on the quality of the wetland being mitigated. They are not a one-too-one ratio with acreage. A lower-quality wetland will lower the required credits, and therefore the cost of mitigation. A higher-quality wetland will cost more to mitigate. In this case, they are “lower quality wetland systems,” Ray Tyner, the city’s deputy chief development officer, said.
Planning board members were concerned about the tendency of London Drive to flood, and how the new development would affect water flows. “Will the developer be doing something to help alleviate that problem that currently exists?” the board’s Sandra Shank asked. Shank was also concerned about the elevation of homes on higher fill than surrounding homes, and how–or whether–that would create flooding, as has been the case with some new construction in the city’s older, or “infill” areas. An Alliance engineer said swales around the development will catch water, preventing it from going into the development. But he could not answer the question about London Drive.
Inside the subdivision, the houses will be lined with curbs and gutters, not swales. That’s the city’s requirement for all new subdivisions. “We’re done with the swale business,” Tyner said.
“What we’re hearing here,” Clint Smith, the board’s chair, said, “is make sure that you accommodate that. If there’s a problem there now, you will be blamed for it being worse, no matter whether you are to blame or not. So be careful and make sure that you have capacity in your system to accommodate that.”
Tyner said the developer will have to provide all relevant, flood-prevention calculations at the preliminary plat stage. “The city, especially with new subdivisions and abutting existing single family lots, we look at that very, very carefully,” Tyner said. “When we did have some sites where a newer subdivision where we did see some issues, where the water was kind of collecting, that field work, we are asking for any modifications that would happen during construction, even if we see something that we might not see on paper.”
The development is a three-step process. First the subdivision master plan goes before the planning board for approval (or rejection) based on the city’s land-development code. The application then maps out the preliminary play–the site’s infrastructure–then onto the final plat. The last step goes before the City Council. Wednesday’s step was the initial one. “This is only a conceptual approval of the overall project,” Lens said. “Technical requirements related to environmental engineering standards, storm water drainage, utility infrastructure and other site-specific considerations will be further reviewed and addressed during the preliminary plat approval process.” The preliminary plat step is administrative only, so neither the planning board nor the council will be involved.
The proposal drew just one comment from the public–a question about traffic–before the board unanimously approved the Matanzas Park master plan, 7-0.
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