County Officials Say There Will be No Fuel Depot Or Landfill on 1,900 Acres Bunnell Seeks to Rezone Industrial

There will be no fuel depot or fuel farm, nor a landfill, at the nearly 1,900 acres Bunnell city government is speeding through a rezoning from an agricultural designation to industrial, Flagler County officials said this evening. 

“They’re not going to have a fuel depot. This is not Belvedere, so they’re taking that off the table on this land,” Assistant County Attorney Sean Moylan told the County Commission during this evening’s meeting of the commission. County Commissioner Leann Pennington said that the land will not be zone for a garbage dump, either. 

That does not rule out the possibility that the fuel farm could end up somewhere in Flagler County.

Belvedere Terminals is the St. Petersburg start-up looking for a few dozen acres to build a massive fuel depot at a railhead in the region. The depot would have a gasoline storage capacity of 12.6 million gallons. Ormond Beach last year rejected the plan after the company’s long battle with residents there. Flagler County and Palm Coast governments were ready to cede 78 acres to Belvedere off U.S. 1 to build there. Residents rebelled, and Palm Coast reversed course.

Belvedere started looking further south in the county, and appears to still be doing so. Bunnell City Manager Alvin Jackson would not comment last week when asked if Belvedere was prospecting in Bunnell. 

If it is, it is doing so further south than in the acreage slated for a rezoning in Bunnell. 

Jackson’s and Bunnell’s secrecy about the motive behind the large rezoning led to speculation among residents, who have sent a stream of emails and other forms of communications to Bunnell and county officials, overwhelmingly opposing both the rezoning, not just over fuel depots or garbage dumps.

“This is not just a city issue for Bunnell. It’s going to impact all of Flagler. We’re going to feel those effects all over our county,”  Savannah Brinkworth told county commissioners, from water resources to wetlands to flood protection to recharge issues. “What’s most troubling is the straight rezoning approach that this is taking–no environmental studies, no traffic analysis, no site plan, no public review of the impacts, just a blanket industrial designation.” She described that as a shortcut. 

The county will have the opportunity to comment on the rezoning to Bunnell government at the rezoning hearing later this month, Moylan said. “The attorney for the land owner has called me several times, called our office, and is doing a good job, in my view, of engaging with the county and getting started a conversation and coordinating and listening to what our concerns are,” Moylan said. Orlando attorney Tara Tedrow is representing the landowner. 

The owner, he said, is reconfiguring the rezoning request from heavy industrial to agricultural industrial, which limits the type of industry that could be cited there. “They were trying to address the concerns of the public, and they are proactively engaging with the county, so I view that as a good thing,” Moylan said. 

The original proposal by the landowner–the proposal that went to the Bunnell Planning Board–was for the majority of the acreage–1,383 acres–to be heavy industrial, and 459 acres to be “agricultural community industrial,” or ACI zoning. 

Agricultural community industrial allows such uses as blacksmith shops, ornamentation iron manufacturing, sheetmetal products manufacturing, planing and millwork manufacturing, culvert manufacturing, concrete forming and fabrication operations, and so on. 

The rezoning is paired with an amendment to Bunnell’s comprehensive plan. The Bunnell City Commission after the first reading of the comprehensive plan amendment will “transmit” the proposal to the state for review, at which point Flagler County and other local and state agencies may comment on the proposal. The County Commission asked Moylan to appear at the transmittal hearing before the Bunnell commission later this month, to make the county’s concerns clear.