As County Throws More Cold Water on 22,000-Home ‘Western Expansion,’ Developer Defends Retreat from Previous Commitments

At last Monday’s County Commission meeting the county administration threw more cold water on the proposed development of 22,000 homes on 22,000 acres west of U.S. 1 commonly known as the “western expansion.” The proposal has weathered a few public cold showers from a Palm Coast City Council member and the mayor. 

“The agreement will leave in place the potential future possibility of injecting wastewater into the aquifer,” Deputy County Attorney Sean Moylan told the county commissioners Monday. “If it were approved today as written, it would not allow for that to happen immediately. There would have to be a separate approval later. But it at least opens the door for the subject, and it’s something that’s never happened in our county before. The aquifer doesn’t just follow jurisdictional lines, it really belongs to all of us.”

Moylan was referring to a particular segment of the 128-page development order, known as a master planned development agreement, or MPD, that opened the way for incinerator plants, hog and poultry farms and “deep well injection of waste products,” among other uses. None of those uses would be permitted without an amendment to the MPD and an affirmative vote by the regulatory boards. But the list had been added there in the third version of the MPD, in essence opening that door Moylan was referring to. 

On WNZF’s Free For All Friday this morning, Mike Hahaj, the director of commercial development and operations for Raydient, the development arm of Rayonier, the land holder, addressed some of the concerns, among them what he called “the list of horribles.” 

Bottom line: the list has been deleted. 

“It was actually brought up by the city, or some of the staff, as we were working through it, and it’s like the things that you’re not going to do,” Hahaj said. “We mirrored what the city already has in its existing code. We recognize that the unintended consequences is it made it look like that was something that was brought forward to be enabled, and that was not the concept. So we just took it all out of there, because the intent was never to do those things. That was just one of those things. No good deed goes unpunished.” 

That MPD proposal is still in draft form. It was supposed to go before the Palm Coast Planning Board last month. City Manager Mike McGlothlin put the brakes on it for further administrative deliberations before it reaches the regulatory boards, including the City Council. 

It is actually a proposed scrapping and replacement of existing development orders dating back to 2010. The development order, called a master-planned development, or MPD, would replace two so-called “developments of regional impact,” one for what was to be the Neoga Lakes community, the other for the Old Brick Township community. The MPD would double the previously permitted housing units and reduce the developer’s financial commitments to the city. For example, whereas the DRIs required the developer to assume the cost of major road connectors and a sports complex (or at least a central sports amenity), the MPD relieves the developer of those responsibilities. 

Free For All host David Ayres relayed a FlaglerLive question to Hahaj about those differences, as well as the doubling of the housing units. 

“Those development orders were very focused on very unique pieces of land,” he said. “What you see occurring today is a regional and a statewide initiative to bring in infrastructure for different reasons, whether it’s this loop road in connection to the future corridor of County Road 2209 as a third evacuation route north and south. Those are things that are bigger than us.”

Hahaj was referring to the loop connecting Matanzas Woods Parkway and Palm Coast Parkway, for which the city hosted a groundbreaking in mid-May, and the future State Road 2209 that would ostensibly connect I-95 south of Jacksonville to I-4 east of Orlando, traversing the dorsal edge of the Raydient development. The road is still in the conceptual stage. Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris used the groundbreaking occasion to slam Raydient’s plans. (See: “Palm Coast Mayor Norris Turns Loop Road Groundbreaking Into Lashing of Western Expansion and Developer.”)

“What was contemplated in those DRs, or DRIs, are really at the local level kind of thing, and you know, frankly, the infrastructure and that groundbreaking we had the other day isn’t even on land that was associated with those. That’s an entirely different piece of property, so a little bit of a mismatch there, I think, when you try to compare the two.” 

Hahaj answered the mechanics of the question by avoiding its substance. It isn’t clear what the state’s larger aims have to do with a developer’s commitments to the local municipality, or why the state’s alleged aims should in any way interfere with a development order to which it is not a party. 

Observer Editor Brian McMillan tried to restate the question from a different angle: if the state’s broader aims got Raydient “off the hook” for some of its previous commitments, does that mean the “landowners would compensate in different ways, like, okay, now that we don’t have to pay for that, maybe now we can pay for this instead, or if you can find some other public-private partnership for a sports complex that’s not involving us, then let’s do this instead. Is there kind of a give and take there, or is it more–it’s not our fault that these are being done by other people, so but we’re going to benefit from it, and we’re happy about that.”

“This is the concept of together is better,” Hahaj said, citing the state’s involvement as a spur to economic development. “The DRIs were focused on very specific pieces of land on a smaller scale, so it’s not one or the other, it’s one plus one equals three kind of thing. When you recognize it and get a state investment on a larger level, and maybe specifically to the sports complex, that’s a little different too. What a lot of people may be referring to is a junior Olympic swimming pool or something that was acknowledged in the DRI versus a 180-acre regional sports park that involves many multi-purpose fields and facilities, that is an amenity and an anchor on a regional basis. Again, two very different things.”

Would Raydient be involved in the funding of such a complex? 

“That’s bigger than us,” Hahaj said. “We’re the landowner. That’s where we can step in and do things and help, because that’s what we have.” 

In other words: No. 

It’s that sort of resistance that led Palm Coast City Council member Theresa Pontieri on two occasions to sharply criticize Raydient’s retreat from previous commitments. She first did so as a warning shot in September 2024, and when she saw no substantial change in the company’s approach, did so again, in harsher terms, in April, calling the proposal “garbage.” 

Pontieri listened to Hahaj on Free For All and did not seem convinced. “We cannot allow the internalization of profits and the externalization of costs by the developer,” she said after the show. “Our first priority must be ensuring infrastructure is provided for and doesn’t fall on the backs of the residents. That’s how we succeed in the west for the unforeseeable future of the city and county.”

On Monday, Moylan, the deputy county attorney, used gentler terms to describe parallel dissatisfaction with the MPD. 

“Our first round of comments were not really addressed to our satisfaction, and we’re concerned about impacts to county roads, and of course, as you know, we’re concerned about impacts to the Old Brick Road,” Moylan said, before speaking of the industrial uses.

The County Commission and the City Council are intent on protecting Old Brick Road, an 8-mile stretch of brick-built road dating back to about 1915. It is the last remaining continuous stretch of the Old Dixie Highway that had cobbled together different roads to connect Michigan to Miami. It runs through the Raydient MPD. Raydient had wanted to have the ability to crisscross it several times. It’s a county road. The county is not willing to grant that sort of access short of guarantees about the road’s protection in other ways. Those issues were not addressed today. 

“The agreement, as written today, the language suggests that the Old Brick Road could be dedicated by the developer to the city of Palm Coast or HOA or CDD,” Moylan said, referring to an eventual homeowner association or community development district. (Grand Haven and Hammock Dunes are CDDs.) “But it’s not theirs to dedicate. Just like I can’t give you the Brooklyn Bridge, because I don’t own it. They can’t give away the Old Brick Road, because all rights, title, and interest to that road belong to the Flagler County Board of County Commissioners.”

Assistant County Attorney Sarah Spector and the county’s planning department are working on a further set of comments to the MPD. 

Rayonier owns some 55,000 acres in Flagler County. It was the major land-seller to ITT when ITT developed Palm Coast starting in the late 1960s. “We usually just keep our head down and grow trees until somebody picks up the phone and asks us to do something,” Hahaj said. 

Rayonier is not the actual builder. “We do a lot to organize the framework for things to allow that growth to occur,” Hahaj said. “Builders and things come in and do that.” But Rayonier/Raydient will not be going away. 

“What we do today, we’re here 25 years from now,” Hahaj said. “A lot of the folks that you would think of as a developer come in, they do what they do, and they’re in and they’re out. Maybe it’s three years, five years. For us, we’re stewards of land and the communities that grow a lot of times grow because we release those lands for others and the municipalities to create that economic development. So we have a long term vested interest in the area and take that long term perspective.”