Developer Reveals Master Plan For 22,000-Home Western Expansion That’ll Remake Palm Coast

A few dozen Palm Coast residents on Wednesday got their first, cursory look at what the so-called “western expansion” will look like when Raydient builds a planned 22,000-home development on nearly as many acres west of U.S. 1 over the next three decades. Between those homes and the 6,000 yet to be built on Palm Coast’s old ITT lots, the city’s population will almost double in that time span. 

Raydient is about to submit its proposed development plan to the Palm Coast Planning Board and the Palm Coast City Council for approval. Approval is eventually likely, but not necessarily immediately guaranteed, especially as innumerable details have yet to be publicized and worked out. Those details were not available on Wednesday. As high-level perspectives go, the one Raydient provided at the Palm Coast Community Center was from about the stratosphere, as even the map color-coding the future plans suggested. 

Instead of “sections” (as in P-Section, B-Section and so on) there’ll be four or five yet-to-be-named “villages,” each with its commercial center, its grocery and retail stores, its medical and other offices. Housing density would be much higher in the village center than beyond it, with between eight to 10 housing units per acre in the center. 

There’ll be a couple of K-8 and a high school, possibly in one educational campus that would go from pre-K to junior college. There’ll be fire houses and police stations, and a “regional activity center,” or a sports complex. 

There’ll be a mixture of housing choices even as single-family homes still make up 75 percent of the total. “There will be places here where you’ll probably have some apartments. There will be places where you have estate lots,” said Karl Soderholm, a landscape architect and planner with England-Thims & Miller, or ETM, the Jacksonville-based design and engineering firm on the project. “So the real advantage here is that you’re going to get a lot of diversity in pricing.”

There’ll be 3.2 million square feet of industrial acreage, mostly at the south end of the development nearer U.S. 1. There’ll be a lot of open space and vast swaths of wetlands that can’t be developed. There’ll be spots for eco-tourism, possible beach-like access to a trio of lakes on the southwest side of the development. And there’ll be roads crisscrossing it all, including that “loop road” from Matanzas Woods Parkway to Palm Coast Parkway, and the future state highway 2209 (currently referred to as a county road) that will skim the western edge of the development as it cuts a new path from I-95 in St. Johns County to Orlando. 

Raydient is the real estate development arm of Rayonier, the timber and land holding company that owns close to the totality of the currently vacant acreage west of U.S. 1 but for forests and scrubland. 

Raydient and its design and engineering firm, Jacksonville-based England-Thims & Miller, or ETM, presented their very general plans in what was dubbed as a public neighborhood meeting at the Palm Coast Community Center. City government requires developers to hold such meetings ahead of regulatory hearings and approvals of their projects. The neighborhood meetings are intended to be informational, with developers always making verbal presentations outlining the proposal, showing displays and answering questions for all to hear. 

To the disappointment of many and displeasure of a few, that’s not how this neighborhood meeting went. Raydient set up a few large displays in a semi-circle at the Sunshine Room of the Palm Coast Community Center. There was no verbal presentation. 

The public–what there was of it, anyway–was invited for just 60 minutes to walk around and look at the four or five displays, which weren’t that different from each other but for a city map showing long-term transportation plans. The main map had already circulated in city documents that were not previously made broadly public, but that were available. The map had little context.

A couple of screens showed silent, marketing videos of existing Raydient developments: one in Georgia called Heartwood, and another just south of the Georgia border in northern Florida called Wildlight. 

The “neighborhood meeting” was barely publicized. It was not posted on the city’s calendar (such neighborhood meetings never are). Council members were not aware of it. The city’s communications department was not aware of it. ETM sent notice of it to the county administration, but it was only the eagle eye of an executive assistant, Rose Keirnan, that caught it and forwarded it to Acting County Administrator Adam Mengel and other top staffers, then onto county commissioners. Commissioner Andy Dance mentioned it at last Monday’s commission meeting. Perhaps 50 people showed up all told over the course of the hour.

The company made available a few ETM representatives to answer questions, if anyone had any. The ETM representatives, among them Karl Soderholm, a landscape architect, and Grant Bledsoe, a civil engineer, took every question asked and answered each in detail. But most people did not necessarily know which questions to ask since the companies were not providing a contextual overview beyond the maps shown. As displayed, it was as if the proposal had no history, which is not the case. 

For example, there was no way to know that the development was for 22,000 homes, why the development is now 10,000 homes greater than when it was first approved in 2010, how those housing units would break down between single-family homes, townhomes and apartments (a breakdown is available here), how they would be clustered and according to what criteria, who would pay for the roads and other infrastructure yet to be built, why–as Palm Coast City Council member Theresa Pontieri has asked twice in the last two years–are taxpayers shouldering the cost of a new road through the development that the developer was required to pay for in earlier versions of development plans, who would pay for the sports complex that appeared in one of the maps, and so on.  

Nor were there explanations regarding the changes between 2010 and this year. The explanations would have been central to the new face of the development, compared to when it was first proposed as two, smaller, separate developments in 2010, since the current proposal is a direct result of the company’s decision to scrap the previous versions. 

Nor were there explanations about the city’s planned annexation of some 7,000 acres in the next few weeks. That annexation will be news to most residents, and not just in the city. The annexation incorporates a large part of the proposed development (now on county land) and will increase the size of the city by 12 percent. The annexation is all but a done deal since Rayonier is voluntarily annexing into Palm Coast. There are no residents on the land to be annexed. The county has no say. 

For a proposed development of such colossal size–in essence, a second Palm Coast–both Raydient’s and the city’s dearth of preparatory information for public consumption has been stunning, considering that the city and Raydient have been working on the Master Planned Development for several years, and that the plan is going before the city’s planning board in May, and the City Council, for approval, this summer. (City staffers repeatedly alluded to the western expansion during the development of the latest comprehensive plan, but in general, vague terms.)

Acting Deputy City Manager Kyle Berryhill stood by on Wednesday, ready with explanations, next to one of the displays that illustrated mostly in government jargon the regulatory steps ahead for the “westward expansion.” The display explained the “what” ahead. It did not explain the “why.” 

Namely: why have the 2010 approvals been shelved and replaced with this much larger plan. 

In 2010, the Palm Coast City Council approved those developments as so-called DRIs, or developments of regional impact, a regulatory term that gives local governments greater authority to define the parameters, the looks and the requirements of a development, with timelines and other expectations. 

The two developments were called Old Brick Township and Neoga Lakes. Old Brick Township was named after the historic Old Brick Road that cuts through the west side. Neoga Lakes was named for one of the small lakes on the west side. Neoga Lakes was permitted for 7,000 homes (or housing units) and 2 million square feet of non-residential development (commercial, retail, office, industrial). Old Brick Township was approved for 5,000 homes and 1.15 million square feet of non-residential development. In other words, 12,000 homes total. (See summary analysis of each development order here and here.)  

The DRIs are still the official development documents. Raydient wants to scrap those DRIs. It wants to replace both with a single Master-Planned Development, or MPD. The MPD still gives the city significant authority to define the manner and scope of development. But the MPD Raydient is proposing retracts numerous previous commitments, including paying for the loop road that taxpayers are putting up $126 million to pay for, paying for the sports complex, and paying for other amenities that are part of its commitments in the two existing DRIs. 

The MPD requires approval by the City Council. The Planning Board’s recommendation is to Raydient’s advantage, but a Planning Board decision is not binding on the council. Only two public hearings on the MPD are scheduled before the council. 

With that approval, should it be granted, the next step would be negotiations between the city and the developer on more detailed “concurrency” agreements that define each side’s responsibilities for infrastructure, who pays for what, and when is it built. Those agreements will require City Council approval as well. Only after that would there be permitting–which takes over a year–site (or building) plans, platting and construction. Bledsoe, the ETM engineer, estimated the earliest time for house construction to start is about two and a half years away, assuming regulatory steps are fulfilled at a reasonable pace. 

No part of the displays at the Community Center presentation alluded to future plans for Old Brick Road, the historic brick road the County Commission intends to protect, and that the county, the city and the developer imagine as a future nature park and tourist destination. But maps do show the future state road connecting I-95 to I-4 hugging Old Brick Road for much of its Flagler County length. 

Why so close? “I guess there’s a couple of trains of thought on that,” Bledsoe, the ETM engineer, said. “One, the road is a straight road, a straight line, and so it’s an established road today. The thought would be that you somehow preserve and highlight the road, make it accessible to people, versus just ostracizing it in the corner of the property. So you would have a road that runs off of it. It’s not right on it, but it’s a clear corridor today.”

The public notice that was mailed ahead of the Wednesday meeting:

2026 04 08 recd 04 10 - ETM St Aug - Neighborhood Meeting 04 22 - PC MPD Westward Expansion