Flagler County Wants 2025 To Seal the Deal for Beach Protection, Paid For Mostly With Your Taxes

The Flagler County Commission wants to ensure that 2025 will be the year when it will vote in a beach-management funding plan, ending Flagler’s long and undistinguished run as the only county in Florida without one. A beach-management plan will ensure that the county’s 18 miles of beaches will have the money necessary to keep them in the sand, their dunes rebuilt and the beaches renourished when necessary, especially between long periods when federal portions of the shore in Flagler Beach are not due for renourishment.

To get there, the county will have to agree, with local communities like the Hammock, and likely with cities, on a plan that may including taxing components, whether through targeted taxing districts or through a more cross-county tax, like a dedicated portion of the property tax. The county has been struggling to develop such a plan for the past several years, managing its beaches meanwhile on the fortune of state and federal grants. But there are no such federal and state funds for regular, annual maintenance of the beach, or for renourishing (or rebuilding) the majority of the county’s beaches.




“One of the hardest things to deal with for me was go to these beach management conferences and find out we’re the only county that didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a funding plan,” Commissioner Greg Hansen said. “Other counties around here write a check when it’s time for beach management. That’s where we should be.”

“Obviously beach management is now a big component, especially this year,” Commission Chair Andy Dance said. The county hopes to do finalize the plan over the next few months.

The commission discussed the plan and other leading budget priorities during an afternoon workshop Monday when County Administrator Heidi Petito set the table for the budget year ahead. That begins with hearing from each commissioner about his or her own priorities, “defining the board’s policies and priorities” ahead of next year’s budget, Petito said.

As Dance explained it to his new colleagues on the commission, Kim Carney and Pam Richardson, “in the past, during budgets, at least when I first came on the commission, the budget process was heavily administrative-driven, and it got to where come August and September, where we should have everything worked out, and staff is just going through the motions of finalizing the budget, we would get commissioner recommendations at the last minute, which throws the process in turmoil.”




That changed. The commission now gives direction almost a year ahead of time. The administration uses that guidance to build the budget. Petito and her administration will hold one-on-one meetings with each commissioner between now and early January to get their list of priorities. The commission will discuss those at a January 13 meeting, where they will presumably adopt a communal plan. The budget season will kick off on Feb. 10, even though, in effect, the season has already begun.

But certain priorities may top the list regardless, starting with beach management. Other such top-line priorities may include “progressive reduction” in the property tax rate, if only to prepare for an eventual recession, when the county may have no choice but to compensate for the loss in revenue by raising the property tax. The commission has managed to fractionally reduce the rate in some of the past few years, though the declines have been more symbolic than substantial, and the general fund tax rate today ($7.9297 per $1,000 in taxable value) is almost the same as it was a decade ago ($7.975).

A tenth of a mill–the rate is calculated based on “millage,” or thousandths–works out to about $1.4 to $1.5 million. An additional tenths generates that revenue. A deduction reduces the budget by that amount. The county’s general fund this year has budgeted revenue of $155 million, with $23 million of that in reserves to account for emergencies–or, as has been the case in previous years, to pay for unexpected requests by commissioners, the sheriff of other constitutional officers. That’s the sort of late-season requests Dance is hoping to pre-empt with the more deliberate, year-long budget preparation.




Another top-line priority, in Dance’s view, is employee retention, “a huge issue in trying to keep our best and brightest working for us here,” Dance said, to keep surrounding counties from luring Flagler County’s employees away. Keeping that a priority next year implies that the administration should build in another employee raise.

The county is also focusing on economic development, as it has every year. It has recently approved establishing a municipal bond authority that should make it easier to finance private projects with bonds. And it has numerous other objectives that would be accomplished within the scope of coming budgets without needing the sort of policy framework that the commission’s priorities would need. Those include continued planning for construction next year of the general aviation terminal at the county airport, followed by the construction of another hangar there the following year, a dozen or so road and bridge projects (Commerce Parkway, the two-lane road looping from State Road 100 to U.SD. 1 on the east side of Bunnell will be completed toward the end of 2025. That’s a joint county and city project.)

A few new trail projects are on the list of new objectives, as is the construction of Fire Rescue Station 51 in Espanola and Fire Rescue Station 62 in Bunnell, which will have an administrative wing.

The county’s capital projects of “anticipated maintenance and new construction projects” extend to 56 needs between 2025 and 2029 (see the list here). It’s a fluid list, dependent on what the county can afford and what commissioners end up deeming most important.

The list doesn’t include additional, planned projects for 2025, such as an $882,000 security retrofit at the county jail and $1.6 million in spending on the county’s future tourism, or Eco-Discovery, center on State Road 100, with $8.8 million expected to be spent on that project the following year. Numerous maintenance projects are funded. Numerous ones are not.