What Bunnell Vice Mayor John Rogers is calling a “city within a city” with “no compatibility with the size, the character or the infrastructure” of the city will start taking shape west and south of Bunnell as a divided City Commission on Monday gave final approval to the 6,100-home development known as the Reserve at Haw Creek. The development will sextuple the size of Bunnel, a city of 1,000 households at the last census.
As was the case two weeks ago, when the commission approved a series of regulatory steps on first reading, it did so with the same 3-2 split. Commissioners Pete Young, Dean Sechrist and Mayor Catherine Robinson voted in the majority, Rogers and Commissioner David Atkinson were opposed.
“If not Haw Creek, then what?” Sechris asked the crowd. He had opposed the development during his campaign for office, but soon became a supporter.
Rogers had asked Young to amend his motion for approval and lower the number of entitled housing units to 5,500, as the city’s planning board had recommended. Young declined.
“This process has not been rushed. It’s been over three years,” Robinson said. The statement was misleading. It’s been over three years in the administration. But the public heard about it for the first time only 16 months ago, in May 2014, when the proposal was first unveiled at a commission meeting. It was Robinson who, with Young, revived the development proposal in late June two seeks after the commission had voted to kill it.
“There were at least three workshops regarding this with the public,” Robinson continued. “If you noticed and looked at the beginning of this, I would say, every one of the concerns that you had regarding the number of households, and the different variety of issues that you were concerned about, the developer addressed those. It’s not at 5,500, it’s not at 3,000 but it’s not at 12,000 either or 8,000. And the 6,100 homes or 6,100 households are the most that could be developed. Doesn’t mean that they will.”
Robinson did not say that future amendments to the agreement, if approved by the commission, could also change the density upwards and add housing units during the development phase, which, while it may not start for several years, would stretch over decades.
By then Palm Coast’s so-called “westward expansion” is expected to have been well under way, with a pair of major developments west of U.S. 1–Neoga Lakes and Old Brick Township— that by themselves would add 12,000 housing units, or twice as many as the Reserve at Haw Creek. Each of those also projects a town-center-like area and commercial space, as does an ongoing development in Flagler Beach, as does Palm Coast’s Town Center. How that glut of similarly designed developments will each support their town centers is one of the many unasked questions.
Members of the public filled the new chambers of the City Commission, which was holding its inaugural meeting at its own $10 million City Hall since its dedication on Aug. 27. The 80 chairs in the relatively small chamber (compared to the county’s) were not enough for the crowd, so people had to stand along the walls. It was not the happiest occasion, and it was anticlimactic: the outcome was foretold, with none of the commissioners in the majority offering any hint that they could be swayed against the project.
Residents tried. The commission heard pointed voices about fears of flooding, of traffic congestion on roads without plans to accommodate the growth, of the unforeseen. “As I said to Pete Young,” one resident said, “when you back a dump truck up to your pool and dump a load of dirt in your pool, the water comes out of it and goes over to your neighbors, and that’s what’s going to happen here.” (Palm Coast’s stormwater engineers would dispute the example, saying a development’s stormwater system ensures against that scenario.)
Among the voices were that of County Commissioner Leann Pennington, whose commission district represents the west side. “I thank you for saying you could speak from your heart tonight, because sometimes that’s all people have,” Pennington told Robinson, saying she was there to speak as a resident. “A request of this magnitude is a privilege granted by your board, not an automatic right. Once approved, this development can morph under future boards or under state laws such as SB 180, Live Local and new legislation currently under consideration. This state is actively eroding local authority over development.”
Pennington was right about the state’s sharp scaling back of local regulatory authority. Up to this point, however, the shape of the Haw Creek development has been the doing entirely of the Bunnell commission and administration, with the developer’s agreement after the development was initially rejected to lower the total number of housing units from 8,000 almost back to what it had originally proposed when it first unveiled it to the commission last year, with an extra hundred units tacked on.
Pennington was warning that the city was out of chances to control the development. “Once you give approval, your ability to deny future change will be weakened. A project that looks acceptable today could become a nightmare tomorrow, something you never intended when you first approved it,” she said. “I suspect you all will spend the rest of your lives wandering through town explaining to upset residents of what your vision was versus what this project will actually become. The revenue you expect also may never materialize.”
Growth, in sum, does not pay for itself, she said. “So that is what I’m here asking for you tonight,” she said. “It only takes three of you to stand up, use common sense and be rock stars in this community. Table this matter until the city and county can catch up on infrastructure and flood mitigation projects, and until we see the outcome of the upcoming legislative session, where lawmakers have promised to revisit bills like SB 180 and hopefully restore local authority over development.”
But the commission majority wasn’t concerned with SB180. The proposals it was about to approve were giving the developer–Jacksonville-based Northeast Florida Developers, represented by Chad Grimm–a wider berth than whatever the state was enabling.
The commission majority sees Haw Creek Preserve as a boon to the city’s economy and its imprint on Flagler County’s map, now that it has given clearance to what will be one of the largest single developments in the county since ITT platted Palm Coast in the 1960s.
The Haw Creek development–borrowing and somewhat deceptively alliterating its name from one of the region’s state parks, which U.S. Rep. Randy Fine wants to include in a new national park–would encompass nearly 2,800 acres between State Road 11, State Road 100, County Road 302 and County Road 65, rezoning agricultural land to a “planned unit development” that would have single-family homes, apartments, duplexes, an RV park, commercial and industrial zones, while pledging to keep 60 percent of the acreage green.
The commission voted on three items Monday–the amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan (the blueprint for the city’s long-term growth), the planned unit development ordinance, and the development agreement. Those details were technicalities. To the crowd before the commission, it all added up to a transformation of Bunnell. If it is a small town today, the old portion of Bunnell will become a mere neighborhood, if not a suburb, to the new development, which would at buildout dwarf the city in size and population.
“What I’d like to see is go ahead and vote on it, and whatever happens, happens,” Young said, suggesting that the comprehensive plan amendment can go to the state, “and if the state says there’s too many houses in too small an area, or there’s too much flooding, then let the state decide that.” But Young was misunderstanding the comprehensive plan process. The state no longer tells local governments whether to develop, or how. Its review process is a formality, with suggestions–not the authority to require changes.
Rogers, the vice mayor, asked his colleagues “not to rubber-stamp it,” and to vote their conscience. Whether they did or not, they approved the development.
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