Palm Coast Planning Board Unanimously Rejects 22,000-Home Western Expansion Over Unanswered Questions

In a pair of unanimous 5-0 votes that overrode the city administration’s recommendations, the Palm Coast Planning Board Wednesday evening rejected the proposed land use changes that would clear the way for the so-called western expansion and the development of 22,000 homes west of U.S. 1 by Raydient, the Rayonier subsidiary. The development would add 55,000 new residents at buildout in 2056.

The Planning Board said the proposal left too many questions unanswered and too many stakeholders–the School Board, the county, neighboring residents–on the sidelines while giving residential development a priority the city does not need right now, compared to commercial and industrial development. Board members were also concerned about the proposal’s malleability at the hands of future developers, much of it, possibly, out of public view, since it diminishes the regulatory role of the board or the City Council.

The votes were a stunning rebuke to a plan four years in the works, or more than two decades in the works, if the original, smaller development plans finally approved in 2010 are included. But the proposal now moves to the City Council, which has the authority to override the Planning Board’s recommendation.

Two council members–Mayo Mike Norris and Theresa Pontieri–have been critical of the proposed development plan in the past two years. Three other council members have hung fire, or leaned, if anywhere, in its favor.

None were at the board meeting Wednesday evening. Pontieri followed the meeting online.

“I’m glad the board members had many of the same concerns I’ve voiced about the proposed MPD,” Pontieri said. “I was planning on attending, but both my son and I are sick.”

Two actions were before the Planning Board: to recommend a change to the Future Land Use Map, or comprehensive plan, for 20,144 acres, and to rezone the entire acreage to the Palm Coast designation for master planned development. Some 7,000 acres are under the county’s designation and have yet to be annexed. Raydient Palm Coast, a subsidiary of Rayonier, the timbering and real estate company, owns the entire property.

The Master Planned Development itself was not up for a vote, though its substance, or lack of clarity, drove the discussion, and the opposition. The MPD calls for building 21,920 housing units, overwhelmingly single family homes.

“The last thing we need at this point in Palm Coast are more residential homes,” Planning Board Vice Chair James Albano said. “We have a plethora of new construction. We have more used houses days-on-market than in a long time. Yet we have no industrial. So, in my opinion, residential right now is low hanging fruit, and we keep hearing that. Well, we need rooftops in order to get commercial. Well, we don’t need another Home Depot or we don’t need another Lowe’s. We need industrial jobs. We need bigger companies with a lot of employees. I think we’re missing the boat just to try to get more people to live here, which is not going to flip the tax base. We need to flip the tax base.”

“I don’t think there’s enough information here for us to make a decision on a lot of things,” Planning Board member Garrett Decker said. “This isn’t like it’s a a residential development that we’re just saying, hey, this is an HOA development and you’re going to build housing. We’re planning another city expansion. I love the idea of the westward expansion. I think that it will reduce a lot of infrastructure strain on the current city and bring in financial support that we need for commercial and industrial. But I don’t like to just say, hey, we don’t have any information. Go do what you want, and that’s kind of what this is.”

“I don’t think anybody up here is saying we want to absolutely deny, nor are we saying we are ready to approve it, because there’s not enough information,” Planning Board Chair Sandra Shank said, pressing for tabling the items rather denying them. She said if the proposal went before the City Council, the council could ignore the Planning Board’s concerns. Her colleagues disagreed.

“We have a choice to make, whether we trust our parents at the City Council,” Decker said, “or or we make our own statement and just say no, we don’t like the project, and if the city approves it, then the city approves it.” He made both motions for denial, and both carried.

In 2010 the city approved development orders for Rayonier called developments of regional impact for half the size of the current request. The DRIs are called Neoga Lakes and Old Brick Township, covering 8,912 acres, and would have added 11,000 housing units. Raydient is seeking the repeal and replacement of those DRIs with the proposed Master Planned Development.

The City Council adopted the so-called western expansion as a goal in 2022, including creating three westward punctures across U.S. 1 and the Florida East Coast Railroad at Matanzas Woods Parkway, Palm Coast Parkway and Whiteview Parkway. The “loop road” under construction with a $125 million state appropriation, starting at Matanzas Woods Parkway, will connect that road with Palm Coast Parkway. There are no current plans or appropriations for Whiteview.

The MPD works hard to avoid the impression that Raydient would be housing sprawl, using terminology like “villages” and “village centers” in place of “subdivisions,” with more commercial uses mixed in to create the sense that each “village” has some viable mixed residential and commercial autonomy in its “village center,” and some walkability around those commercial hubs.

The new development would have a 950-acre “regional activity center” and two “employment centers” totaling 560 acres and providing more than 10,000 jobs at buildout, according to Raydient. The proposal calls for 3.2 million square feet of industrial space and 2.6 million square feet of commercial and office space, along with a 28,000 square foot, 20,000-seat sports venue, 1,000 hotel rooms and a 100-bed hospital. It is difficult to imagine that many jobs on just 73 acres of industrial zoning and 60 acres of commercial and office space.

It would serve as a “focal point” for the new community, Jose Papa, a senior planner with the city, said. Papa presented a surprisingly scant staff report on what amounts to the largest reconfiguration of Palm Coast since its creation by ITT. Papa defended the proposal as “no different than the other MPDs, that larger MPDs that we have.”

Half the land in the proposed MPD would remain open space. But that includes wetlands that cover 40 percent of the land and that cannot be built on anyway.

Mike Hahaj, the director of commercial development and operations for Raydient, and Ray Spofford, ETM’s vice president of planning, spoke on behalf of the application. They told the Planning Board that “there is still a lot of work to be done,” but that the process ahead would answer a lot of pending questions. Spofford alluded to a planned but not yet built or funded new road–County Road or State Road 2209–that would connect I-95 to I-4, providing a new bypass to Central Florida and running through Raydient land further west.

“We believe that the overall concept plan for the westward expansion is consistent with the guiding principles that came out of the Imagine 2050 effort and the recent update to the city’s comprehensive plan,” Spofford said. Imagine 2050 is the city’s long term development plan, which reflects Raydient’s imprint.

“As Palm Coast approaches build out, say in the next 10 years,” Spofford said, a reference to the last 6,000 remaining “infill” lots platted by ITT in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the value increase of property tax base is not likely to keep pace with the cost increase of providing public facilities and maintaining those facilities and services. So we believe that this provides the city with a unique opportunity for a long-term solution, a growth dividend, so to speak, more economic diversification for the city.”

In Spofford’s view, in other words, the only way for Palm Coast to remain economically viable is to keep growing and developing–a disputed assumption that developers and even city managers frequently make, and that raises the inevitable question: when Raydient is done building out, what then to keep that development and the rest of Palm Coast viable? Further annexation into the wilds of West Flagler? Flagler Estates perhaps? An invasion of Putnam County?

“I don’t think we have nearly enough industrial and commercial in this project than what we need, especially if we’re trying to diversify the tax base,” James Albano, one of the board members, said. “The one slide showed that we had three 2 million square feet of industrial space, which is 73 and a half acres. If Amazon decided they wanted to build a distribution center, which they built in Ocala, which is a million square feet, it required 90 acres. So, if Amazon came into town, that would deplete all of the proposed industrial. And with 21,000 units, I just don’t think we have enough industrial or commercial on this project.”

Papa said the proposal would allow the city to add industrial and commercial land. Other board members were uneasy with a provision that allows the development to keep building residential homes without making those contingent on commercial or industrial development. All the developer has to do is set the land aside for those designations. “So there’s nothing that states that you have to stop building residential. You just have to set aside land, is what you’re saying,” Board member Garrett Decker said.

“And then a and there’s nothing that prevents you from coming before the board requesting an amendment at any point in time, correct?” Board Chair Sandra Shank said. That, too, was correct.

“In practice,” Planning Manager Phong Nguyen said, “if there is no rooftops, non-residential is not going to come. So we we have to acknowledge that that fact.” He added: “We have to also have that understanding that even though we would like to have non-residential to come in in order to balance our tax base, but the reality kicks in is that you have to have certain number of residential development first in order to do that.”

The previous city council and administration defended the western expansion as a way to balance out existing Palm Coast’s disproportionate reliance on a residential tax base. Here was Nguyen now saying that the disproportion would continue before reaching a critical mass that would generate non-residential activity, which begged the question not asked Wednesday evening: why hasn’t that happened in Palm Coast proper?

Board members were also uneasy with the loop road’s construction as a one-lane road (in each direction) instead of an immediate three-lane road. “We’re just creating the same issues we have now by not saying, Hey, the MPD is going to have to do this and put those requirements in,” Decker said. He was touching on a sore point City Council member Theresa Pontieri has raised on several occasions: that the developer isn’t assuming enough of the infrastructure burden.

“That’s part of the discussion that we need to talk [about] as we move forward into what we call it now step two, in order to make that happen,” Nguyen said. City officials critical of the plan’s timing wanted that reversed: ensure the commitment first, then proceed.

The sports venue drew its own skeptical questions: “20,000-seat sports arena,” Board member Dana Stancel asked, “what’s the purpose or need for that in a housing area, and how much is it going to cost, and who’s going to pay for it?”

“Good question,” Spofford said. “That’s going to be determined, you know. But down the road, the purpose of that is to provide a catalyst for a regional activity center that would then attract other uses around it, other non-residential uses, retail, restaurants, entertainment, lodging.”

“This is all conceptual,” Shank said. “Doesn’t mean that any of this is going to happen this way, and it doesn’t mean that the landowner won’t have the right to sell off any portion of this property at any point in time. So it’s very important that we’re trying to narrow them down to what it’s going to be.” She added: “Once they get the designation, there is nothing that stopped Rainier or Radiant from selling this entire project off to somebody else, and then they will come back to the city for a more for the technical site plan review for the actual design of the of the project, which could occur amongst several different developers.”

Many of the questions her colleagues were asking, she said, were irrelevant at this point. Shank said the westward expansion is Palm Coast’s “only opportunity to get it right for economic development.” The board should be focused on the immediate ask: the land use designation and the rezoning. But Shank, too, raised questions, especially about the preservation of historic sites west of U.S. 1, among them Old Brick Road, and the by-passing of Espanola. Preston Zepp, Palm Coast’s city historian, added concerns of his own.

Chris Wilson, an attorney representing the Flagler County school district, added further concerns about how the development will provide for the addition of a projected 4,400 students, an impact of $188 million on the district, though school impact fees would generate only $111 million. But Wilson was making assumptions that all 4,400 of those students would go into district schools–a vastly speculative assumption at this point, when the district is losing students to publicly funded vouchers for private education and homeschooling.

Assistant County Attorney Sarah Spector added the county’s concerns. “We are concerned, just like the school board,” Spector said. “What is before you is essentially an agreement to agree. Once you agree here, it cuts everyone else out. It wasn’t discussed in detail, but there are very few things that will go back to you for consideration once this is approved.” Great parts of future development steps, Spector said, will never go before the Planning Board or the City Council, but would only get administrative reviews, out of the public eye.

“This is a large project. It’s going to have an impact regionally, not just on the city,” Spector said. “And we want to make sure that all residents of Flagler County are accounted for, and that all of the facilities are in place, and the level of service is sufficient to serve the entire county, not just Palm Coast. So our request is that we be involved throughout the process, that it not stop with the development agreement.” (Spector issued a three-page letter to John Zobler, the city’s community development director, outlining the county’s concerns. See the letter here.)

Sarah Lockhart, a Palm Coast city planner when the original DRIs were approved (she left years ago), said the proposal is silent on environmental set asides. “If we don’t have something in place like who is going to maintain this area,” Lockhart said, “who’s going to manage it? Who’s going to own it? It will simply not evolve as we originally had hoped to see it.” She listed options, and noted the plan’s deficiency regarding hurricane evacuations.

“This is our one and only shot,” Albano said. “We know what’s going to happen. It goes to the City Council. City council is going to go: Ooh, look, we got a shiny new toy. Boom! It gets approved, and every MPD comes back.” He wants better guarantees up front on “how we split the tax base.”

The meeting was, surprisingly, sparsely attended. The more board members spoke, the clearer it became that the vote to recommend would fail. The recommendations against the requests are non-binding, but send an unmistakable signal to the council that the western expansion may not yet be ripe for approval.