This time, the Palm Coast City Council wants to be very clear with the state legislature and the governor: the city’s priorities for state dollars are its oldest of two sewer plants, and for one of its three water plants.
Ahead of the 2024 legislative session, the city had asked for $35 million for the sewer plant and money for several water and drainage projects. It go none of it. The money it did get was earmarked for road projects into the city’s “westward expansion” west of U.S. 1. Council members led by Theresa Pontieri were furious that the city had not more explicitly lobbied for requests with a sense of priorities. They don’t want the same scenario with the coming session.
“I don’t want what happened last year or in the last legislative session to happen again,” Mayor Mike Norris said. “I want to say specifically: We need water treatment and wastewater treatment.” But he cautioned: “We’re going to be at the low end of the totem pole, and we can prioritize most of this stuff any way we want, but we have to have all our water needs up front.”
“If the governor has a list of things on his desk and he looks at our representatives and says, What are the top two things your city wants, we need to all make sure we’re on the same page,” Pontieri said. “We had two asks that got all the onto the governor’s desk and then got vetoed. I don’t want to see that happen again.” Among those vetoes: a new fire station and the city’s hoped-for YMCA. The request for the wastewater treatment plant was cut down to $1 million by the time it made it through the House and Senate conference, and Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed that last $1 million.
The city still got a record $150 million in state appropriations in two years. It benefited from its House representative, Paul Renner, being the House Speaker those two years, and Travis Hutson being in the senate leadership. Both lawmakers are gone. They were term-limited. They’ve been replaced by junior members: Sam Greco in the House, where he has no experience and will be a back-bencher, and Sen. Tom Leek, who can leverage some of his accrued seniority in the House, at least to some extent. But for Flagler County and its cities, the legislative sessions ahead are going to be very different from the last two years. The pork barrels have stopped. The question is how to ask for the possible, and what to ask for.
It’s truly a wish list, topped by the water and wastewater needs. Those needs are themselves driven by a wastewater plant under a consent order, because it is now running over capacity several months a year, and a rate structure still not strong enough to ensure the amount of revenue needed to build the city’s water and sewer capacity to meet future needs. (It is a misconception that the city’s water and sewer infrastructure cannot handle current needs. That there is occasional overcapacity at the sewer plant doesn’t mean that processing is backed up, though a less intensive processing takes place during heavy rain events, which push the system beyond its capacity.)
Old Kings Road’s widening has frequently made it on lists of legislative requests, and it does so again this year. The widening of the Old Kings Road-Palm Coast Parkway intersection was phase one of a three-phase plan. That’s done.
Phase two construction will widen Old Kings Road north to Frontier Drive in 2025. The city has the $18.3 million construction money in hand. The Legislature appropriated it two sessions ago. (The city would lose the money if it did not move forward with the plan.) Phase three would extend the widening all the way to Forest Grove Drive. “So when this is complete, we’ll have four lanes all the way from Palm Coast Parkway to Matanzas Woods Parkway,” DeLorenzo said. Phase three costs would be at least $20 million, likely more. That’s the appropriation the city would ask for next year.
Pontieri does not think it necessary to ask for the phase three money just yet, if construction of phase two isn’t starting until next year and the city is focusing on water needs. If the city were to get money for phase three, it could potentially combine phase two and three during construction. But other council members agreed with Pontieri.
The intersection of Old Kings Road and Town Center Boulevard and the widening of Old Kings from Town Center Boulevard to just south of Palm Coast Parkway are also on the city’s project list as it hopes to develop Old Kings Road as a “parallel” alternative to I-95, when the interstate is clogged or shut down. Old Kings Road would also play an important role as an evacuation route. The Town Center Boulevard-Old Kings Road intersection is poorly designed and highly trafficked, and crisscrosses with other elements (such as the nearby canal) that complicate the area’s flow. Two years ago the city got a half-million dollar appropriation to pay for a design to realign Town Center Boulevard and make the intersection safer. The city is seeking money for construction.
“It’s going to be very complicated, and it’s going to be a long process,” Carl Cote, the city’s chief engineer, told the council. But he could not provide a complete cost for the project just yet. “From my standpoint, I think we need to make the ask with regards to legislator priorities on this one,” Council member Charles Gambaro said, with agreement from Council member Ray Stevens, who considers the north end of Palm Coast Parkway less critical. So that portion of Old Kings Road made it on the list.
The city’s hopes for a YMCA were dashed last spring when the governor vetoed a $6 million appropriation. Council members were concerned about resubmitting the ask. DeLorenzo said with Leek now in the Senate, the timing remains right, so is the city’s buy-in, since the facility would be built on city land. Council members tentatively agreed to push for aquatics as a priority, but clarity on their approach was lacking: they want more information. So it’s not clear how high up either the city pool or the YMCA will end up on the council’s final priority list.
In the main, they want appropriations that would encompass improvements to the city’s municipal pool–where the city should keep its focus, in Stevens’s view–as well as the YMCA. “I don’t want to remove the YMCA because then that takes Senator leak out of it,” Pontieri said. “But I do think that it needs to be repackaged to focus on the aquatics necessity.”
The city also has a trio of drainage projects further down on the list, and a request that would help the city analyze future acquisitions of wells to serve the city’s water needs in the future, but that particular request moved down the list of priorities closer to the refurbishing of Fire Station 22, the station the city is turning into a historic building. And Like the County Commission, the council did not prioritize building a new animal shelter.
Pontieri was hesitant to finalize the priority list before January, but the city is under pressure to get the priority list finalized in time for the county to print a booklet that includes all local governments’ priorities. “We’re working under the county’s timeline here, and we’re already behind as we waited for the new board to be seated,” DeLorenzo said.
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