Bunnell’s 8,000-Home Development Plan Nears Approval. Residents Raise Questions. Officials Don’t.

Members of the public had many questions, at least to the extent that they were allowed to speak their mind. Members of the Bunnell City Commission and its planning board barely had any as the two panels met in a joint workshop Thursday evening to examine the development agreement for the 8,000-home Reserve at Haw Creek project that will transform the city.




It was an arresting contrast with the Flagler Beach City Commission, which is going through a similar process with Veranda Bay, a 2,400-home proposal that will transform Flagler Beach. Flagler Beach officials have to date held half a dozen meetings and workshops to analyze that development agreement. On two occasions they’ve gone through the agreement line by line, lowering the number of allowed homes by hundreds, adding conditions, specifying language, sharpening the city’s expectations. Residents have made their own demands–and threatened litigation.

The Bunnell workshop Thursday was oddly timed, with many residents still in holiday mode. It set up key decision meetings in coming days where the city’s planning board and the commission in turn will take up the developer’s rezoning application, a momentous step in the regulatory process. The Reserve is a plan for up to 8,000 single-family homes, apartments, town homes, duplexes and condos.

But for one inquiry by a Bunnell city commissioner and a another by a planning board member, elected officials and their advisory board members sat back, let their administration and the developer run through their summary analyses and their answers to residents’ numerous questions, but otherwise stayed mum. They did not raise a single substantial question. They did not propose a single alteration or condition or ask for any clarifications. They did not refer to the development agreement, which was discussed in the abstract. A powerpoint was the extent of the documented detail.




The developer has been meeting with commissioners in person, but in closed-door meetings. The public has not been privy to the substance of those discussions. Commissioners further narrowed the scope of Thursday’s workshop by limiting members of the public to just two minutes at the podium, instead of the usual four (Mayor Catherine Robinson was indulgent with the limit, however), and allowing speakers only to ask questions–not make comments.

Community Development Director Joe Parsons summarized the project from the city’s perspective. Northeast Florida Developers’ Chad Grimm did so for the developer. City Manager Alvin Jackson added a few thoughts. That was it, but for residents’ questions, some of which were answered, others answered in the broad generalities.

“Sometimes we don’t like your questions, but we do like the process, and we do like to hear where your concerns are,” Grimm said at the end of the two-hour meeting. “We’ve made adjustments throughout this process as a result of of hearing from you along the way. So I just I appreciate everybody coming out and asking and being as very diligent on doing your research and in time and attention, looking into the project.”

He was referring to residents.




The developer pledged that Black Point Road, which currently floods, will not flood worse, as ditches will be “modified to fix the current flooding.” Bunnell says development rules in the city forbid drainage from new developments to flood neighboring properties. As for locating the Reserve in a flood plain, the city says the property includes three flood zone designations, one of them with a high likelihood of flooding. But most, if not all, development will take place in a zone where the risk of flooding will be “moderate to low risk.”

The developer is assuring the city that it will either build or share in the cost of building road improvements to accommodate the traffic generated by the Reserve. It will maintain all its internal roads, but not other roads.

“We did propose early on the idea of putting in an elementary school within this. Property. But according to Flagler County, from a facility standpoint, they are they have enough facilities,” Grimm said. “Where the current school district is deficient is both the middle and the high schools, and there is adequate land at the existing facilities. It was their preference to receive monetary contribution to expand those facilities as this project grows.”

Grimm noted that based on existing land use regulations, mixed-use zoning would have allowed 33,000 dwellings. The current comprehensive plan “would allow 12,402 units by right.” But last May the developer proposed 5,000 to 6,000 homes. Somehow, between then and now, that grew to “somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 units,” Grimm said. “But regardless, we would not exceed the 8,000 units.”




The developer wanted to lower the proportion of green space from 60 percent to 50 percent. Both the planning board and the city commission denied the request. Green space will be dispersed throughout the neighborhoods, and will be “available to all the residents” of the city, not just of the development, Grimm said. There will also be a community center with ballfields, pickleball and tennis courts, and a community pool. (See: “Bunnell Says No to Developer Seeking To Reduce Open Space By 10% at 8,000-Home ‘Haw Creek Reserve.’”)

The buffer between the development’s perimeter and neighboring communities will be 10 feet, and in some places 15 feet. On County Roads 65 and 80, the buffers will be 35 feet, with a no-access easement. In contrast, the large Veranda Bay development in Flagler Beach, along John Anderson Highway, is providing buffers of 50 to 75 feet.

Building heights will be 35 feet for single-family homes. Apartment buildings will rise up to four stories and 55 feet. Two-lane roads will have a minimum of 12 feet for each lane throughout the development. (The majority of streets in Palm Coast have 10-foot lanes.)

There will be extra parking, based on lessons learned from flaws at Grand Reserve, the 800-home development built over the past decade and a half on the east side of Bunnell. At the Reserve at Haw Creek, single-family homes will have two parking spaces for three-bedroom homes, and three parking spaces for four-bedroom homes. On top of that, every five homes in a neighborhood will have two extra on-street parking spaces.

“Affordable housing is integrated throughout the community,” Grimm said. “Similarly how we’re integrating the green space in each neighborhood, affordable housing is integrated into each neighborhood where 10 percent of the homes will be designated or allocated for down payment assistance.”

The development has some industrial parcels, including an RV park area that could fit up to 750 recreational vehicles, though that may be altered to include an RV and boat-storage area.




Resident Chelsea Herbert noted the apparent absence of a performance bond. “I know that this is a binding contractual agreement,” Herbert said, recalling the housing bust of 2006-08 that left numerous local developments unfinished, and local governments paying the price. “It may be in the interest of the city and our residents to consider requiring the owner to provide a bond, like in the event that a 2008 situation happens, and they have all these houses started with no [certificates of occupancy] and aren’t able to finish your wastewater treatment expansion or potable water treatment, and then we’re stuck with half-baked infrastructure.”

City Manager Alvin Jackson said bonding will be required at the time of platting–the final stage of development before homes are actually built.

Larry Rogers, who has been among the more rigorous critics of the development, asked why the city was not requiring a hard cap on housing units through the Planned Unit Development, since a PUD would authorize just such a cap. The question reflects a skepticism about the reliability of the developer’s pledges.

Parsons said the PUD “does limit the roof count to 8,000.” Parsons then made a startlingly inaccurate claim: that there’d never been a switch from 6,000 to 8,000 homes. Rather, city staff had at one time pulled the figure of 5,830 homes from a submittal by the developer to the school district. “That’s where the original number may have come from, about the 6,000 roundabout but there was no discussion other than presentations as to how many homes were going to be built,” he said.




Not so: in May, Grimm, standing before the City Commission at the time of the vote to transmit the comprehensive plan amendment to the state, had explicitly sated that the development would consist of 5,000 to 6,000 homes.

Rogers was equally skeptical about the submitted PUD. “I would like to ask everybody to keep in mind that these are only conceptual drawings, and they could change at any point in time,” he said. THat’s true up to a point–the point at which the city administration and City Commission make conditions and expectations explicitly part of the PUD, which the developer cannot then alter without approval from the commission. It wasn’t clear from Thursday’s workshop how explicit those conditions ae, and neither planning board members nor commissioners requested conditions, though it is in their purview to do so.

“Why can’t we acquire more information around the specifics prior to the adoption of the PUD?” Rogers said, referring to “vague controls” in the document, whether it’s the ultimate number of homes to be built or the financial arrangement requiring the developer to provide a sewer plant.

“When will we see an accurate representation of the PUD and what should be in it?” another resident asked, citing several pledges by the developer that aren’t written into the document. “There’s a lot of deficiencies. And this is a contractually binding document. Since they’re the writers, any interpretation in court of law would go to their interpretation. That’s why we have to have very specifics in that document, and any ambiguity goes to them, not us. So I just really would like to have the opportunity of seeing the written word before the city or the other board vote on this.”

Parsons said the PUD “is the written document.” As to the lack of specifics, another official said “you don’t know all of those until you go into full design. At this stage, it’s more of a general layout and a generalization of what they would like to do with the land.”

“They can’t get to design until a PUD is adopted,” Jackson said.

“What’s with the drawing and master planning scene is conceptual,” Grimm said. “It will change. I’ve never been–we’ve never been shy about that. It will. But it will change within the parameters of the PUD.”

Members of the public had additional questions about the future cost of schools generated by the 8,000 homes. Parsons, the development director, said the 8,000 units would generate roughly just $38.2 million in school impact fees–nowhere near the revenue necessary to build a school.




One resident was skeptical about the plan for that volume of homes. A resident questioned the rise of apartment buildings near her rural estate. There was an indecorous, prejudicial comment from the floor inaccurately comparing apartment buildings to a “future slum,” though even Grimm went out of his way to reject the notion of low-income housing, as if it were anathema: “We don’t have low income housing. What we have is down payment assistance,” he said.

Others questioned how, with so little existing room, turning lanes would be built on State Road 100 and State Road 11, and whether a new traffic study will be forthcoming to show the development’s impact on 11. The city projects no increased traffic on 11, while Grimm said “there is technically room” for turn lanes “based on a preliminary engineering study, or preliminary traffic study that we originally did with that.”

Another wondered about the potential property tax revenue the development will generate. The developer could not answer the question, deferring to the city. There were questions about what land would be dedicated for future fire and police stations. (The developer is dedicating four acres for public services to the city.)

The development “may take up to 30 years to build out,” Parsons said.