Site Plan for Florida State Guard Training Facility in Bunnell Approved, But Questions Loom Over Its Future

By the time the stalled Florida State Guard training facility opens in Bunnell, if it ever opens, Gov. Ron DeSantis, at whose initiative the State Guard was reactivated in 2022 after its disbanding following World War II, will be long gone. 

The State Guard has itself been struggling. “Allegations of misuse of taxpayer dollars, sexual harassment and poor planning and budgeting by the Florida State Guard’s top executive [have] sparked a wave of departures of senior officers, pilots and rank-and-file soldiers who also say they have been retaliated against for speaking out,” the Orlando Sentinel reported last January. 

The Guard’s core function–a 40-member Special Mission Unit designed to help in search and rescue operations after hurricanes–was reduced to seven members after it was purged of less-credentialed military veterans. The House balked at funding the agency last spring until a House-Senate conference resolved the impasse with reduced funding and less staffing. 

Whether the governor’s pet project will survive next year’s budget negotiations under a new governor is not an idle question. Nor is questioning when, and if, the training facility will ever open. The Bunnell facility was $15 million over budget as of January. It isn’t clear where money to build it with the excess is coming from. Local officials have so far asked only the first question. 

“I was at the groundbreaking a couple of years ago on the Guard training facility,” Palm Coast City Council member Dave Sullivan told Sheriff Rick Staly at a council meeting last month, not intending any irony or humor, though there has not been an inch of sand moved at the 62-acre site near the county jail since the November 2024 groundbreaking. “Could you give us a status on that?”

“I’m as frustrated as probably everybody is on that,” Staly said. “This project is three years behind schedule. I would encourage the governor to ‘doge’ his Florida Department of Management Services, because everywhere and everyone I’ve talked to has told me as soon as they find out they’re in charge of it, they said, ‘Oh, let me guess, behind schedule, over budget.’ That’s exactly what we’re seeing. Why it’s taking this long, I don’t have any clue.”

“Doge” is the acronym for the ephemeral “department of government efficiency” the trillionaire Elon Musk appeared to run for a while in President Trump’s first year until it fizzled long before its official expiration last July 4, in accordance with the president’s executive order. Some states, Florida among them, have attempted to replicate the exercise, with equally vaporous results. 

But the Bunnell Planning Board had good news for Staly and Sullivan. It unanimously approved the site plan for the project at its meeting on Tuesday–assuming the State Guard pays an $11,000 bill it owes Bunnell for reviewing plans. The two bills are long overdue.  

“My staff told me everything went well, we didn’t think it was going to be a problem,” City Manager Alvin Jackson said today. “I didn’t think there was any real issue, we have been working with them for months. It hasn’t been the city holding it up, it’s been the state.” 

Located off Justice Lane, the road that dead-ends at the county jail, it is to include an administrative building, a “shoot house for training exercises,” as the Bunnell administration describes it, a 65-foot observation tower (public buildings are allowed by code to exceed the 35-foot limit), and a 13-acre driving training course. “They did previously have plans for an outdoor shooting range, but that has been wiped from the plans, and I believe will be possibly a future development plan later on,”  Bunnell City Planner Adrian Calderon said. 

The city and the State Guard’s engineers went through three rounds of city comments on the Guard’s plans since May. Several questions are not resolved. “We’ve been working back and forth with the utility department,” Joe Cimino, who heads WRA Engineering of Tampa and is the engineering firm for the project, said. “It’s been going on for so long that utility connections aren’t ideal to the east, and there is a bunch of new development to the west. So we have actually been flip-flopping between, do we connect here or do we connect there? Do we have two connections on Justice with two backflow preventers, or just one? The lift station isn’t designed because are we going into a manhole or are we going up to the force main? So there’s been tons of back and forth, and we’re just sort of waiting to see where the adjacent utilities land before we finalize that.” 

The county owns the property. It falls within Bunnell’s jurisdiction, so Bunnell land uses apply. The property will tie into city water and sewer. The property will be landscaped with a perimeter. With the site plan approval, all permitting is now the county’s responsibility. But both city and county will oversee construction, with the county conducting inspections. 

A half dozen conditions were attached to the Planning Board’s approval, such as a utility easement agreement and the payment of a couple of invoices totaling $11,000 for engineering reviews. One invoice was billed almost a year ago, the other in April. Neither has been paid. 

As with so many things involving the State Guard, “there has been a lot of confusion, and who would be the one to pay for those invoices,” Calderon said. “Originally, it was expected that Flagler County would be paying those, but because of an existing agreement between the state guard and the county, the state guard was actually the one responsible for paying those, and we have been in communication, but I have not heard anything as to when we will be receiving those payments.”

“I really wish the speaker of the house would have given me the money or the county the money instead of tying it to the State Guard,” Staly told Sullivan, referring to Paul Renner, the former Speaker who was largely instrumental in working with Staly to locate the training facility in Flagler County. “That thing would have been built and done by now. I’ve heard this many times, they’re claiming that they will have the permits by the end of July. But I heard end of last year, I’ve heard January, and I heard March, and I’ve heard May. Now it’s the end of July. I really don’t know. I’m extremely frustrated with it, and it’s kind of one of these things: I’ll believe it when I see it. The money’s there, of course. [The Florida Department of Management Services] has already taken $2 million off the top, so there’s only $8 million left to build it. They’re saying now it’s a $25 million project. I said, you guys are full f you know what. That’s exactly what I told them.”