At the suggestion of Scott Spradley, its chair, the Flagler Beach City Commission this evening voted unanimously to table the proposed annexation of Veranda Bay until next year so city officials have time to study the merits of what Spradley described as a threat to sue the city if annexation went ahead.
“The city received a letter yesterday threatening a lawsuit having to do with what I’ll call the enclave issue,” Spradley said, referring to the central claim in the letter by the attorney representing opponents of the annexation: that if the measure went ahead, the new city boundaries would create an enclave of eight privately-owned properties that would remain in the county’s jurisdiction. State law explicitly forbids annexations if they create enclaves, though challenges are rare, and enclaves are frequent: the Flagler County airport is all but a vast enclave surrounded by Palm Coast boundaries.
Nevertheless, annexation creating an enclave provides a cause of action, if opponents want to take it. FlaglerLive reported on Wednesday on the letter tha prompted the delay. (See: “Threat of Lawsuit Over ‘Enclave’ Is New Snag on Eve of Flagler Beach Vote on Veranda Bay Annexation.”
“Because of that, in my opinion, not only as a member of the board, but as a lawyer, that requires us to study it,” Spradley told a full house at City Hall. “I think it would be a disservice to the community, and I’m speaking my personal opinion here, to have a written threat of a lawsuit if we approve the Veranda Bay annexation before we have an opportunity to study it.”
The commission tabled the items to the Jan. 23 meeting at City Hall. It took no public comment, though during the segment of public comment for matters not on the agenda, a resident had suggested that the next meeting addressing Veranda Bay take place in a larger venue, so as to accommodate the larger crowds. The commission was hesitant.
“There are all kinds of rules about what has to be available at that meeting site,” Commissioner Jane Mealy said. In all the 19 years she has been on the commission (Mealy is now the second-longest serving elected official in Flagler County, after Bunnell Mayor Catherine Robinson), the commission had held only one meeting offsite.
The commission had three related items on Veranda Bay on this evening’s agenda, and tabled all three. It had no choice, since the controlling uiutem was the annexation.
The large crowd, likely dominated by opponents, could not very well have been disappointed: the letter by S. Brent Spain, the Orlando attorney retained by Preserve Flagler Beach and Bulow Creek and by John Anderson Highway resident Stephen Noble, who form the coalition opposed to annexation, had at least won a tactical victory, if not quite a strategic one.
“We didn’t know that we would be moving to table these ordinances until last night, early today,” Spradley told the assembled. “So that’s why you didn’t know about it till now, because we didn’t know about it till now.” Ironically, many of the opponents knew that–they knew what was coming before Spradley and the rest of the commission learned of it, since they had authored this latest setback in Veranda Bay’s long regulatory roller-coaster since it reappeared on the development scene as The Gardens in 2020.
The commission’s decision cleared the chamber of most of those who’d turned up.
Spain’s letter makes convincing and seemingly irrefutable arguments. The Spain letter may well be an effort to gain leverage to impose conditions rather than necessarily stop the annexation outright. But absent a settlement, the city is not without alternatives that County Attorney Sean Moylan has already outlined before the County Commission, in emails to officials and in an interview.
If it so wishes, the city may ask for a joint agreement with the county to force the annexation of the eight private properties into Flagler Beach. Neither the county nor the city want to do that. But nor does the city want to have its annexation of Veranda Bay held hostage by the threat of a lawsuit. Annexing those properties in the enclave would be an end-run around the potential lawsuit, disarming its central (and only) tenet.
But it would be at the price of the eight property owners’ autonomy and lower taxes, in the county’s jurisdiction–the sort of autonomy some of the people opposed to annexation currently enjoy in their own properties. In essence, the opponents’ gambit may result in the loss, for those enclave property owners, of the very benefits some of the opponents advocate. And annexation would still proceed.
