Palm Coast City Manager McGlothlin Postpones Raydient Development Review as It Needs 'More Work'

The west has not yet been won. (© FlaglerLive via Google Earth)

Last Updated: 8:31 p.m.

Five days after a majority of the City Council said they are eager to work through the proposed Raydient order to develop 22,000 homes west of U.S. 1, and two weeks before the proposal was to go before the city’s Planning Board, Palm Coast City Manager Mike McGlothlin said today that the whole process is being postponed. He did not provide a new timeline.

“I told staff I don’t want to worry about a timeline,” McGlothlin said in an interview this morning. “I want to worry about being right. So we need to take a very measured, careful approach especially as this is too critical for the city’s not only present, but future.”

The longer the delay, the more the regulatory hearings will coincide with the intensification of the political campaign, with three council members leaving the council by November–Dave Sullivan is retiring, Charles Gambaro is running for a congressional seat, and Theresa Pontieri is running for a County Commission seat. Last Monday, Pontieri, who has been sharply critical of the developer’s stinginess, said she would like to work through the MPD before she leaves the council, but is not guaranteeing her support unless the MPD is done right.

This evening, McGlothlin clarified the timeline: “Work is still continuing between their staff and ours, with the goal of completing this project with the currently seated City Council,” he wrote in a text. “We have approximately 60 days to do so, and will review our work at the 30 and 60 day benchmarks to see where we stand in relation to MPD negotiation. The planning board meeting will need to be rescheduled and we will schedule the remaining meetings as needed.”

Next Thursday, the city is hosting a groundbreaking for the $126 million “loop road” that will eventually connect Matanzas Woods Parkway and Palm Coast Parkway, looping through the Raydient development and, in the more distant future, connecting with a state road planned between I-95 south of Jacksonville and Orlando.

McGlothlin says he’s talked with council members individually and with city staff, but had yet to talk with Chris Corr, senior vice president for development at Raydient, the Rayonier subsidiary that will develop the land. The city had just received the third version of the development document, a 128-page document called a Master Planned Development order, or MPD.

The MPD is the legally binding zoning contract between the developer and the city that defines the parameters of the project and outlines developer and municipal government responsibilities.

“We just received the third revision of that massive planning document, but we’re still a ways out for that to be finished,” McGlothlin said, first disclosing the delay of the timeline during a “Coffee and Conversation” town hall this morning, after a resident asked about the project. “If we are still working on that concept, their team is working with our internal team on fleshing that out.”

The latest revision, for example, added a startling provision that would allow, in the development’s industrial zone–if approved by the City Council with an amendment to the MPD–animal feed lots and livestock operations, the deep well injection of waste products, dog, hog and poultry farms, incinerator plants, junkyards, paper mills and race tracks. (Such approvals are unlikely in today’s climate: the council in the last few months rejected two rezonings that would have allowed concrete batch plants on Hargrove Grade, a mostly light industrial zone.) The MPD version removed a provision for floating restaurants.

On greener pages, the amendments include a requirement of one tree per 2,500 square feet of single family or town home lots. The trails and pathways within the road network’s right-of-way will be owned and maintained by the city, the county (Old Brick Road is a county road) or the state. Private wells would not be allowed on lots smaller than 1 acre. A quite permissive provision to allow golf carts as a mode of transportation was narrowed in the latest version.

The land use and phasing of the project has not changed in the latest version, except to set a hard date of Dec. 31, 2056 as the time by which Raydient is required to have built it out in its entirety. By then, the three development phases, each 10 years long, will have resulted in 15,440 single family homes, 4,480 duplexes, just 2,000 apartment units, 3.2 million square feet of industrial land, and 2.6 million square feet of office and retail space. Schools, parks, recreation facilities, fire and police stations, churches and community centers are not included in the commercial and retail total of square footage.

Both the Palm Coast City Council and the Flagler County Commission have underscored their wish to protect Old Brick Road, the 8-mile segment of historic brick road remnant of the Dixie Highway that runs through Raydient. The development order does not address those wishes, refer to historic preservation, or crossing points. It devotes one paragraph to the road, providing that the developer may conduct “repairs or improvements” on the road, but in exchange for park impact fee credits. Impact fees are one-time levies builders pay for each house to defray the cost of the new infrastructure’s impact.

The MPD is not the only document that will go through regulatory steps, which include a hearing before the city’s Planning Board and what is expected to be at least a workshop and two public hearings before the City Council. Other key parts of the overall picture include the annexation of several thousand acres from the county into city boundaries, the amendment to the city’s comprehensive plan, and the abandonment of two so-called “developments of regional impact,” or DRIs, that the City Council approved in 2010.

The two DRIs were the original version of the so-called “western expansion.” They consisted of half the number of housing units. One DRI is called Old Brick Road. The other is called Noga Lakes. Those were to have been the names of the overall developments. The names are for historic landmarks in the development zones. They have been dropped.

The hinge of all those documents and regulatory steps, however, is the MPD.

“There’s more work that needs to be done,” McGlothlin said. “We need to make sure that every potential asset that we can identify for the city is protected and that the other party’s interests as the land owners are also honored and observed. But we want to do this smart and measure and take the time. This is so critical. We don’t want Palm Coast growth to be what we’re experiencing now, or where we’re having to address our infrastructure out of sequence.”