Bunnell Rubber-Stamping Development Agreement for 8,000-Home Haw Creek Reserve, Residents Complain

Sixty minutes. That’s all the Bunnell City Commission granted a joint meeting of the commission and the city’s planning board to review the 65-page development agreement of the proposed 8,000-home Reserve at Haw Creek, a 2,800-acre sprawl west and south of the city that will change the complexion of Bunnell and the county.

As it turned out, there wasn’t even a review of the document at last Monday’s joint workshop. Nor even a review of the 11 recommendations the planning board had forwarded to the City Commission about the agreement, one of them to lower the total number of homes from 8,000 to 5,500.




As it turned out, city commissioners were mum the entire time, aside from one comment from Commissioner Pete Young, who was dismissive of imposing any conditions on the developer. “Any other changes, I just can’t see,” Young said, claiming that the city would be “penalizing” the developer if his 8,000 homes were lowered, or if other conditions were imposed.

The commission had scheduled the workshop one hour before its own regularly scheduled meeting, thus in effect ensuring that there would be a dead stop to the workshop. Lyn Lafferty, a member of the planning board, was startled by the imposed brevity, as were several members of the public.

The development agreement was hardly discussed. The 11 proposed conditions were not mentioned. The meeting turned into just another chance for the developer to tout the benefits and wonders of the development, for the city administration to outline where things stand, and for members of the planning board and residents to voice what turned into a mixture of exasperation at and pleas to the City Commission to do better–to devote the needed attention and analysis to a development agreement that, once approved, will be “set in stone,” as several people put it. Otherwise, the commission looked as if it were rubber-stamping the most consequential development plan in its history.

Vice Mayor John Rogers had kept silent at the workshop. But at the end of the two-hour meeting that followed, he asked for another workshop to be set, whether jointly with the planning board or not, in compliance with the requests of its members and of residents. Commissioners agreed, and Mayor Catherine Robinson went further, asking that the meeting be scheduled on an evening without a commission meeting, so that it would not be time-limited.




By then, however, most of those who had been at the workshop had gone, disbelieving. But for Rogers’s intervention, it looked as if the workshop had been just an attempt by the commission to go through the motions, to accommodate a request by the planning board for the workshop and be done with it before moving on to an approval of the development agreement.

But that development agreement may not be approved that soon: the state Department of Transportation has raised questions about the development’s infrastructure that have yet to be answered. That may cause delays, possibly significant delays. Those attending Monday’s workshop didn’t know that, either, nor did city officials discuss it.

Instead, they heard Chad Grimm of Northeast Florida Developers, who has been the face of Reserve at Haw Creek, flatter and applaud the city’s planning staff and his own PUD as he addressed the commission at the beginning of the meeting. In a startlingly personal speech that veered to family history and talk of children and grandchildren, he also turned sentimental–and at times self-aggrandizing–before he listed his own credentials and certifications, one of them by the Congress for New Urbanism, to make the point that he’s not a slash-and-burn developer.

“You’ve got a variety of housing types in here,” he said of the future Reserve. “You’ve got nature trails. You got community trails. You got passive recreation. You got active recreation within the community. You’ve got a community center that’s going to be in the Reserve at Haw Creek. You got the commercial town center. You have industrial, public safety, public infrastructure, all of this in there integrated, and 60 percent of the land is still going to be green space.” (The city commission rejected Grimm’s attempt last year to lower that to 50 percent.) The development will pay for all infrastructure costs. He uttered the word “great” six times in the eight minutes he spoke, including the time he referred to the Reserve as a “great, great project.”

The speech left some of its listeners jaundiced.




“I appreciate your passionate speech there,” the planning board’s Gary Masten told Grimm. “I totally understand it, and we’ve been at quite a few meetings, and I truly do believe you come in here with the best heart and mind. But the people sitting behind you are equally as passionate, and we cannot forget them.”

A resident simply ridiculed the speech. “I applaud this gentleman,” he said. “It’s a beautiful community, lovely. But the one thing that his speech didn’t say, is that government is supposed to be a three-legged stool. There are businesses. There is the government itself, which is supposed to serve the third leg, which is the people that live here. This is a windfall for the city. Is this a windfall for me? No. This gentleman’s been banging the drum, shoving this down my throat. I’m not hungry. No, thank you, but there’s no benefit to the citizens. Sure you’re going to get a shiny new trash truck. Is that going to make my trash fee lower? No, probably not. Is it going to repair the roads in front of my house? No, probably not.” He had other unhappy predictions. He said all the amenities the Reserve would bring are already in place now.

Planning Board member Lyn Lafferty has not bought into the rosy picture. She has been the board’s most persistent critic (and analyst) of the development plans.

“An hour is a little bit of a short time for us to to go over everything,” Lafferty said. A lot of time had o be spent on reviewing the development agreement, or the PUD. “This is something that is unlike anything our city has ever seen. It’s going to increase our population by up to five times what it is right now.” But residents are concerned about the burden the development will place on the city, with fears of a lack of services–fire, police, and especially drainage, or lack of proper drainage, that will affect existing homes. ” Downtown Bunnell already has flood issues off Deen Road. We’re worried that multi-family residential areas with rooftops and pavement is going to leave nowhere for the water to percolate into much less permeable space,” Lafferty said.  “A PUD agreement sets things in stone. You can’t go back and erase and make changes later. And so that’s why, in our previous meetings, I really tried to nail down: we’ve got to get to all the details of this.”




Lafferty spoke of the size of signs the development will be allowed to put up, some of them as high as 40 feet–a third the height of the old Bunnell water tower, and a monument on State Road 100 that could be 400 square feet large. “Maybe they won’t build something that big, but that’s what they’re allowed,” she said. She also cited traffic impacts and the unexplored cost of extending water and sewer to every part of the proposed development. That’s why she insisted on a thorough review of the development agreement by the City Commission.

“This is huge. And every single thing that we bring up rabbit-holes into another thing,” Lafferty said. “The reason that it rabbit-holes is because, again, the complexity and the size of this development. And so either we have to hone in and understand every aspect before it’s voted on, or the other option is not an option necessarily, but you know, consideration that this is too big of a project for our small town.” That’s why one of the planning board recommendations was to reduce the total number of allowed housing units.

Planning Board member Gary Garner cautioned against “analysis paralysis,” and said a lot of questions about the development “cannot be addressed until they can get to the next stage with the state, with the permitting process regarding rainwater, runoff, traffic patterns,” he said. “They won’t allow anything to be built that that wouldn’t address these things.” But Garner appeared to be incorrect: the state reviewed the comprehensive plan amendment that enables the development, and signed off on it with non-binding recommendations. It is no longer involved. At this stage, the city’s and the developer’s agreed-upon development agreement–the Planned Unit Development–is the controlling document. That’s why Lafferty was insisting that the focus be on vetting that document: it’s the commission’s last chance to have its imprint and conditions spelled out.

Planning Director Joe Parsons confirmed it. “Once the PUD is approved by the Commission, it’s set in stone,” he said. “Only minor changes can be made by law, and minor changes are just that–minor. That’s stuff like sign place, where you place signs, small things. Any major changes would have to start from scratch. The PUD process would have to start anew. So once you approve the PUD, that’s it.”




For that reason, Lafferty said, it’s more than can be covered in the 27 minutes that remained on the meeting’s clock, which kept ticking.

Several others spoke likewise, several of them asking for a longer or additional workshop. “We’re begging you” for a thorough review, one said.

“It’s too much, too fast,” Cheryl Trujillo, a resident of County Road 302, said (the Reserve would develop over some 20 years). The resident complained about the brevity of the meeting and the absence of deliberative discussion. “Why can’t we just slow down, go through the PUD, sit down instead of having an hour meeting? Why can’t we have a four-hour meeting? Go through page one through 30 and then 31 through whatever, and really dissect what they’re asking us to approve.”

Trujillo was describing the way Flagler Beach recently went through the PUD for Veranda Bay, the 2,400-home development along John Anderson Highway. It did so page by page, twice, over several hours, and has so far devoted long segments to the development through more than half a dozen meetings, not including the meetings of the city’s planning board. The Bunnell City Commission has never examined any of the development’s documents with anywhere near that kind of thoroughness or interest.

Lafferty tried again to have just that kind of meeting–which Monday’s joint meeting was supposed to be. “We’ll have to see about that,” Mayor Catherine Robinson said.

Two members of the public spoke in favor of the development. Dan Wilcox, who owns several thousand acres in and out of Bunnell, including a ranch, was all for the Reserve. “We need this development. It will allow us a more diverse population, a better base to draw our funds from, a better market to work from,” Wilcox said. “It will give us the footing we need.” He said as an engineer he’s built large scale developments himself. “What I find is this one is balanced right where it should be. It shows a good layout of all the roadways, interconnectivity between the major roadways, the arterials. They put their thoughts in this one.”

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