Until a few days ago, a 35-acre hexagonal parcel east of Ponce De Leon Drive and north of Point Pleasant Drive was the P-Section’s last expanse of undisturbed land which, to the dozens of homeowners and residents on its rim, looked like a preserve that would be there forever. But it was never zoned as such.
Last week, feller bunchers leveled the majority of the acreage to make room for a 74-home gated subdivision to be called, ironically, Ponce Preserve, though hardly any of it as its neighbors knew it is being preserved.
The city requires neighbors of the development to be informed by mail of the proposed development, and to be given the opportunity to hear from the developer at a neighborhood meeting. One such meeting was held last June at the Palm Coast Community Center, drawing about two dozen residents. They were concerned about whether the development would preserve natural buffers and what the traffic impact would be, and were surprised that its regulatory steps were limited to a neighborhood meeting. The rest of the regulatory part was conducted administratively within the city’s planning division.
Joe Schofield the civil engineer with Seagate who led the neighborhood meeting, said the homes will be built on 80-foot width lots of 12,000 square feet, placing them on the larger side of homes and lots than the last few years’ trend has been in Palm Coast, where, outside of ITT’s old lots along the city’s streets, 50- and 40-foot-wide lots have almost become a norm in freshly platted subdivisions.
Ponce Preserve will not be age-restricted. It will be a single-phase project, meaning that it’ll be built in one go. The gated subdivision will have private streets and its own stormwater system, so residents will not pay the city’s monthly stormwater fee. The subdivision will discharge its stormwater runoff into nearby canals, but only after treatment. It will have one entrances on Ponce De Leon (at Number 85), with a gated emergency exit on Point Pleasant.
“I live on Ponce de Leon,” one resident told Schofield. “Right now, when I look down the driveway, it looks gorgeous. We have a lot of trees right up over there. Are those all going to be taken down?”
“No,” Schofield said. “The city gives credit for tree preservation for some distance from the property line or the right of way to incentivize builders to try to preserve some of those trees and have some natural screenings in between the walls, the gates, some of that existing buffer, some new planet buffer, some wetland preservation. I think you’ll still have kind of a nice appearance along Ponce.”
Another resident had just moved to Point Pleasant, had what was then only a preserve to look at in front of her home, and has the same question about that side of the project.
In fact, while a few trees are still standing, the lush thickness of pines and greens and of course the entire canopy are gone along Ponce de Leon and Point Pleasant, where home lots are expected to butt up very close to the road. Along parts of Point Pleasant, all trees have been felled, leaving no natural tree barrier, while in other parts, only a thin line of single-file trees remain, some of them angled toward the road as if their roots had already been weakened, and they may not survive the next strong storm. The trees in the preserve had typically risen 40 and 50 feet. (On the plus side, the elimination of the preserve reduces the risk of neighboring homes burning in a wildfire.)
Plans in June called for two small conservation easements, each about the size of a couple of lots–one adjacent to Point Pleasant, the other at the intersection of Ponce de Leon and Point Pleasant. The northwest corner will be devoted to a recreation area, where trees with trunks of diameters of 6 inches or more will be left standing. There may be a trail there, maybe a gazebo, some benches.
The broadest buffer will be on the west side of the project along Pony Express Drive, along a canal. “It’ll be 50 feet of wooded preservation between the waterline and where we’re going to start to clear to build up the pads and build the homes,” Schofield said. There will be no fences on the east or west sides of the overall property, but “there’ll be a wall and gates along the Point Pleasant side, the frontage,” he said. “On the sides, east or west, they’ll just be sort of retained vegetation that we’ll keep there but no fences. So the individual landowners, the buyers, will decide if they want to install a vinyl fence at that time later on. But that’s not the developer’s intention.”
There was concern about traffic in and out of the subdivision, and speeding along Ponce de Leon. Estelle Lens, a city planner, said a traffic study estimated roughly 100 additional vehicle trips at peak afternoon hours.
The controversy about old ITT lots getting built up with new homes at significantly higher elevations than their neighbors’ had not yet drawn the City Council’s attention, but there were concerns about that very issue from residents at the neighborhood meeting, even though the subdivision’s homes would not be that close to surrounding homes. “There’ll be some additional elevation to get those finished floors up, nice and high and dry and things like that,” Schofield said. “I wouldn’t say be from your vantage, it’s going to tower or anything. The average person wouldn’t even notice a really big difference in the in the change in elevation.”
Because the development, by Seagate, is under 100 homes, it did not go before the Palm Coast planning board or the City Council, Lens said. “So you’re telling me a developer can come in here and if it’s less than 100 lots, they can pretty much do whatever they want?” a resident asked.
“They can do whatever the Land Development Code allows,” Lens said.
