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The Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday approved final plats for three residential subdivisions at three of the four cardinal points of the city (north, west, south) totaling 489 single-family houses. Of these house, 147 are to be built on land adjacent to an industrial tract slated for a massive fuel depot.
Final platting is among the most routine, uncontroversial steps in developments’ regulatory process. It is also the final step in a development process that one council may inherit from another, as was the case for the three final plats on Tuesday: the regulatory steps and approvals of the developments go back a few years.
It’s still left to the council to ratify the map that draws the specific boundaries between property lots, assigns addresses and street names for recording at the clerk’s office, and clears the way for building permits for house construction. Irony is not usually in the cards.
It was on Tuesday.
The final plat for the 147 KB Home houses on 45 acres in the Somerset subdivision is part of the Palm Coast Park master planned development (formerly development of regional impact, or DRI), just south of Peavy Grade on U.S. 1.
The acreage immediately to the west of the new subdivision is part of the planned location of a 12.6-million gallon fuel depot on 78 acres, to be run by Belvedere Terminals, a start-up with no experience in the field. Belvedere, county and city officials unveiled the plan last week, only to trigger immediate opposition from city residents, especially from residents of the Sawmill Creek subdivision immediately north of the project zone.
The council heard much of that opposition at the same Tuesday meeting where it approved the three final plats–and called for alternative sites for the Belvedere project. The county has since paused further steps that would have locked in the 78-acre site for the fuel facility.
The Somerset subdivision’s first phase is already built. The newer phase’s preliminary plat was approved in January 2023. Infrastructure construction began the following month. The DRI was approved in 2004. The residential entitlements date back to 2020.
Mayor Mike Norris asked Planner Estelle Lens a question he would most likely not have asked had the Belvedere controversy not cast a pall over the discussion: “When was the zoning on this tract changed?”
Until 2020, the land allowed for industrial, commercial and residential uses, Lens said. Then it was rezoned exclusively for residential. Norris’s claim is that the city under previous councils unwisely converted industrial and commercial tracts to residential zoning, thus creating the situation today where the Belvedere plan, in an island of industrial zoning, is butting up against residential subdivisions and making the project difficult for residents to stomach there.
“I hear you. I don’t disagree,” Council member Theresa Pontieri told the mayor. “I fought against a lot of conversions just in the last two years.”
“We’re on the same page with that,” Council member Ty Miller.
Pontieri asked city staff for the meeting minutes and video of the 2020 council meeting that changed the land use of what is today the Somerset subdivision. “This can be the end product of these types of decisions,” she said. “This is why we have to take these things so seriously and not be tagged as anti-development. Council members were not anti-development. We’re pro-resident, we’re pro-safety, we’re pro what makes sense in our growth scheme. So as we go west and we start to plan this entire 20,000 acres out west, these are the things that we need to be mindful of.”
The lots in the Somerset subdivision will be 40 and 50-foot wide lots. The roads and stormwater system will be managed by the Community Development District (essentially, a subsidy to the rest of Palm Coast, since residents there will still pay their city taxes). But some of the lots will butt up against the industrial tract proposed for the fuel depot. That gave Pontieri pause as she asked about the buffering between residential properties and the adjacent industrial tract.
Lens then explained: “As far as landscape buffer requirements go, residential zoning is not required to be buffered against industrial zoning, per our land development code or landscape code. The industrial development will be required to buffer against residential.” Still: there are just 20 to 30 feet between the end of the residential lots and the beginning of the industrial parcel.
“The premise is that the residential doesn’t know what’s coming in behind them,” Miller said.
“Correct,” Pontieri said. “They have no idea.”
If the fuel depot were to develop just west of the subdivision, the fuel-depot’s owners would be responsible for building buffers or construction screening, based on criteria or timelines the city would require through the site plan.
“With a circumstance like this, this is a little rare where you have residential backing up to industrial,” Ray Tyner, the city’s planning director, said. “We don’t have that in the city. So I think, from a health safety standpoint, I think they would be good neighbors to do that, because we would be concerned about the health safety aspects with backyards fronting them. And who knows. With the developer here at hand, they may have room for a fence, they can come in later and put a community fence in that backyard as well.”
Norris told a resident addressing the council about “cramming” new houses in the subdivision that he was “preaching to the choir.” Other residents raised questions about the Belvedere possibility., They asked whether the city had any obligation to inform homeowners about to buy property in the Somerset subdivision about a “hazardous, environmentally questionable neighbor” possibly coming next door. It does not.
A Sawmill Branch resident, just north of the proposed fuel depot, was more incensed. “When we were buying, nobody said anything about our children being in danger by this type of industrial development,” the resident told the council. “I hear you loud and clear. This was not meant to be residential. This was meant to be industrial. Got it. But we’re there, and nobody told us that I’m going to be waking up in the morning and thinking, Is my two year old going to be poisoned today or not? And I’m sure as mothers and fathers, you understand very well our concerns, and we poured our savings from whole entire life, our savings into these houses, people with asthma, people with disabilities, people who that was their last money. None of them going to be able to get out of there.”
She was not opposed to industrial development next door, she said. “We’re saying don’t put there anything toxic that will kill children tomorrow. That’s all we ask.”
The council approved the final plat on a 3-1 vote, with Norris dissenting. The votes were similar for the two subsequent, much less controversial final plats. The mayor could afford to vote No, knowing that his colleagues would approve the final plats. They had little choice. Voting against a final plat, absent legal justification, is an invitation to a lawsuit.
The Lakeview Estates final plat is for 200 houses on 95 acres on Lakeview Boulevard, about a mile north of Matanzas Woods Parkway, built by Forestar (USA) Real Estate Group. Grand Landings’ Phase 5A consists of 142 houses on 59 acres on the south side of Citation Boulevard in Seminole Woods, some 2,200 feet east of Belle Terre Boulevard.
