A decade and a half ago the Palm Coast City Council approved blueprints for massive developments west of U.S. 1, called “developments of regional impact,” or DRIs, including Neoga Lakes, Old Brick Township, and Palm Coast Park, with entitlements for close to 15,600 homes between them. Palm Coast Park includes parcels east of U.S. 1, and has added entitlements since.
The DRIs included numerous provisions. For example, set asides for such things as parks, schools and sports complexes, requirements that developers within the DRIs build infrastructure, including roads, and specific square footage for retail, employment centers, civic uses, office and residential zones.
Palm Coast spent much of the past year crafting a new comprehensive plan, the blueprint that defines land use in the long run. The plan is completed. The Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday was to vote on whether to “transmit” it to the state for review and approval, before the city can approve it. The step involving the state is largely a formality.
Last weekend City Council member Theresa Pontieri poured over the proposed plan and the DRIs’ lengthy documents. She compared it to watching paint dry, but with ill effects.
“I was floored at what I read,” Pontieri said toward the end of a five-hour council meeting Tuesday night. “I was disgusted. I was truly sick to my stomach, because it has come to my attention that a lot of the infrastructure that the current multi-billion dollar landowner was supposed to put in for us, taxpayers are paying for. And they are paying for it in the form of state appropriations.”
The majority landowner west of U.S. 1 is Rayonier, the Jacksonville-based timber and land management company. (Rayonier places its market capitalization at $4.6 billion.) It currently owns the land, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be the developer of the land. The state appropriations Pontieri was referring to are the $105 million the Legislature appropriated in the last two years for Palm Coast’s so-called “Loop Road” or beltway connecting Matanzas Woods Parkway to the north with Palm Coast Parkway, through the 20,000 currently vacant, mostly Rayonier-owned acreage often referred to by the city as the “westward expansion.”
Pontieri referred to a specific page in the Neoga Lakes DRI referring specifically to the Palm Coast Parkway extension, including the requirement that it would be an overpass, or fly-over, the Florida East Coast rail line that parallels U.S. 1, and that in Phase Two of the development, the road be further extended. “This is the Loop Road,” Pontieri said. “We got $105 million in state appropriations, also known as tax dollars, to pay for something that in a previous DRI that was entered into in 2010, a private multi-billion dollar company should have been paying for.” Traffic calculations in the DRI placed the number of trips generated by the new development at nearly 5,000 peak-hour afternoon trips, requiring additional improvements to U.S. 1 and County Road 13, which spurs into Espanola. The DRI sprawls northwest and southeast of Espanola.
“What really just put the icing on the cake for me,” Pontieri continued, quoting from yet another page in the DRI document referring to recreation and open space, “no later than two years from issuance of the first residential building permit within the DRI, the developer shall commence construction of a public park of up to 29 upland acres,” which must include “but not be limited to a junior Olympic swimming pool, including changing rooms and restrooms, a playground and play fields. Here we are jumping through hoops to try to get a charter amendment passed in order to enter into a public-private partnership for a lease on a sports complex that I think we should look into because of the tourism dollars that can come from it, when all along, this developer, this landowner, is supposed to be paying for it. I am disturbed by this.”
The charter amendment Pontieri referred to is its own controversy. It has mired the council in dispute and division since the council in mid-July approved the wording of the proposed charter amendment, which is to be on the Nov. 5 ballot. The proposal asks voters whether they’d approve eliminating the requirement that when the city borrows more than $15 million (outside of proprietary funds like the Utility Department and stormwater), voters must first approve in a referendum. But the ballot language is more vague than that. It doesn’t say that it’s lifting a borrowing limit, or that voters could previously have a say, and it suggests that only future residents will pay the bills, all of which had led to bitter criticism from the public and now opposition even from two of the four remaining council members, Pontieri among them. Ed Danko is the other opponent.
One of the points of contention has been the motive behind the proposed referendum: to facilitate the construction of what’s billed as a $93 million sports complex. (See: “Palm Coast’s Wishful 20-Field, $93 Million Sports Complex Rests on a Far Future of Dubiously Rosy Speculation.”)
“This is corporate greed at its worst, and it has fallen on the backs of the taxpayer, and I will not stand for it,” Pontieri said. Lest anyone mistake her for Bernie Sanders, she added: “I am a staunch Republican, and this is not what our policies stand for.”
She addressed the city staff and the developers and “those representing the developer” in the same breath (last month Rayonier officials and their local land use attorney met with council members individually to discuss plans west of U.S. 1. Danko and Pontieri have referred to those closed-door meetings, but with few details.)
“You better figure out how you’re going to fix this,” Pontieri said. “When you come back to me, I don’t expect $105 million check to the residents of Florida, but I do expect quite a bit in infrastructure improvements. I expect to know what conservation is going to be set aside, what recreation is going to be set aside, what infrastructure we will get out of this? Because this is a 20,000 swath, a 20,000-acre swath of land that is the future of our city, and this developer that is going to conduct silviculture on it until they decide to build will make plenty of money.”
Yet Pontieri did not make her approval of the transmission of the city’s comprehensive plan conditional on her expectations. She didn’t want to scuttle the city’s staff’s efforts to get this far, and in any case the council has yet to approve the plan after it clears the state’s hurdle. But she is concerned about the plan’s call for replacing the DRIs with a different designation: master-planned development, or MPD, a different regulatory standard.
“Before I even contemplate voting on abandoning those DRIs and accepting an MPD, I want to see exactly what the landowner is going to do. I want to know their plans,” she said. “I want to know what this is being replaced with. I want to know what these DRIs are being replaced with. I want specifics. I want maps. I don’t want to see–Oh, well, it can all be mixed use throughout this 20,000 acres. That is not sufficient.” She hesitated to call it a “warning,” preferring the word “advisement,” and said City Council’s job as well as the administration’s job will be to hold the developers accountable.
She got the council’s support. Council member Ed Danko called Pontieri’s approach a “warning shot,” and opted to vote against approving transmittal of the comprehensive plan “t as extra leverage that we’re serious about it.” (“Everyone grab your parka because hell’s about the freeze over. I agree with Ed,” former Palm Coast Mayoral candidate Peter Johnson, perennial Hatfield to Danko’s McCoy, said.)
Pontieri herself was not willing to make the motion for transmittal. “This is not by a long shot anywhere near the finish line, but this is just the first of many steps that need to occur,” Council member Nick Klufas said, himself making the motion.
