Flagler Beach Approves Historic 545-Acre Summertown Annexation in 4-1 Vote But Numerous Concerns Persist

The Flagler Beach City Commission voted 4-1 Thursday on the largest annexation in the city’s history, a 545-acre addition of a planned development called Summertown that enlarges the city’s land mass by a fifth. At buildout the project would add 3,400 people to the city’s existing population of 5,500, and start with a commercial center of 840,000 square feet. 

Summertown, on the west side of John Anderson Highway, south of State Road 100, is the sister development of Veranda Bay, on the east side of John Anderson. 

“You kind of remind me of ITT, you guys are pretty good at extracting blood,” Jay Gardner, the county property appraiser whose father worked for ITT, the developer of Palm Coast, told the city commission as he commended the city for exacting conditions from the Summertown developer. “You guys have beat him up pretty nicely, and he seems to almost enjoy it. I really don’t understand it.” 

He said what city commissioners have been saying in justification for the annexation: if there is to be development, Flagler Beach should control it, not the county or Palm Coast. “If it’s going to be there, we need to have it,” the property appraiser said. “As a Flagler Beach resident, it’s important to me for the money, and I know that it will be helpful in us having our expenses paid and everything else.”

Commission Chair James Sherman and Commissioners Eric Cooley, Scott Spradley and Rick Belhumeur voted for annexation. Commissioner John Cunningham voted against. There were three votes in all, including those on related regulatory steps–rezoning and the master-planned agreement–all by the same split. The votes were on second reading of the ordinances, making them all immediately effective. 

The annexed acreage includes roughly 153 acres that the developer is willing to sell to Flagler County for preservation of the headwaters of Bulow Creek and the surrounding floodplain, which the county is hoping to buy with a combination of state and local dollars. The annexation was not made contingent on the preservation, nor is the preservation contingent on the annexation, though some residents of John Anderson Highway sought to connect the two, and hinge annexation on a set of conditions. 

“Everyone wins when that property is sold. But let’s get something in writing, if possible, and let’s just be smart about it,” Matt Hathaway, a member of the Preserve Flagler Beach and Bulow Creek nonprofit that’s pushed back against the development over the years, said. He did not get that particular win. 

Ken Belshe, a principal with SunBelt Land Management, the Charlotte, N.C.-based developer of the property, committed to a two-year “good faith” period to sell the 153 acres to the county. 

“The community is watching this, and they want to have as much assurance as they can that property for conservancy reasons, is going to be sold, that there is, in fact, good faith,” City Commissioner Scott Spradley, an attorney, said. “These days, there’s just a natural tendency to assume the worst, you know, and so we’re looking for something that will reassure the community that this sale will, in fact happen.” 

County Commissioner Andy Dance underscored Assistant County Attorney Sarah Spector’s assurances about the county’s timeline and commitment and the developer gave his, but nothing was formalized beyond those pledges. “The county is asking us to trust them. I’m asking them to trust us,” Belshe said. He also turned the tables on skeptics: “I’m concerned that they’re going to change their mind,” referring to the county. “We’re one election away from maybe the appetite for ESL property changing entirely.”

He was not exaggerating. County Commissioner Kim Carney last year raised questions about the use of ESL revenue, drawn from a surtax on property taxes approved by voters with large margins decade after decade. Carney suggested the ESL program’s days as land preservation may be over, and that the money could be used for beach protection.  “So I’m concerned that if we write in some sort of language that sort of locks us in, they lose their appetite,” Belshe said. “And that’s nothing more than a taking, or less than a taking, that’s a taking of our property, basically, because it keeps us from ever being able to do anything with it.”

Dance said he would attempt to get a resolution from his commission affirming the wish to buy the land, with City Attorney Drew Smith’s caution that the resolution would have limited effect: “We have no ability to bind the county,” Smith said. 

Should the sale happen, the density calculation of three housing units per acre would remain, but the actual number of units would fall proportionally to the acreage converted to conservation. In essence, the number of units would fall from a planned 1,620 to 1,165. 

Belshe made it explicit: “If we sell off a portion of the land to the county, of course, we would think that the overall number of units should decrease proportionately,” he said. “I’d make a commitment. We put it in the record tonight, that for every acre of land that the county purchases, we will drop the unit count by three units.” Specifically, the agreement now calls for “ “1,640 units or 3.0 units per acre, whichever is less,” in the words of Michael Chiumento, the land use attorney representing Summertown.

Many residents of the city or along John Anderson Highway–the annexed land was in unincorporated Flagler County–asked for the land sale to be locked in to prevent this or a future developer or commission from backing out. That did not happen, and could not happen, in the developer’s view. “There’s a plethora of opportunities in which the county would not want to buy it, or we would not want to sell it,” Chiumento said. 

The development itself has been in regulatory wrangles since 2019. Despite the city changing annexation rules to remove Flagler Beach citizens’ right to approve vast annexations at a referendum, Thursday’s annexation is only a little more than half the acreage the developer originally wanted to annex. The Veranda Bay side of the development remains on county land after running into legal hurdles raised by opponents of annexation and county concerns. 

As in previous discussions surrounding the annexation debate that has stretched over close to a year and a half, certain issues were the focus of concern for residents and commissioners: buffers between the development and surrounding areas, the so-called “spine road” the developer is required to build to connect John Anderson and State Road 100 through the center of Summertown (the county wants the threshold of construction to be 150 units, whether apartments or single family homes, not just single family homes), traffic, utility and fiscal impacts. 

“The developers submitted to the city a fiscal impact study prepared by Strategic Planning Group, Inc,” Kim Carney, the former Flagler Beach city commissioner and a current county commissioner, told the city commission. “According to SunBiz, this firm is currently inactive and has administratively dissolved. Despite that, the city is relying on this study to support a major financial decision.” 

She questioned the city’s reliance on a study produced for the developer, rather than one independently produced for the city. City officials have relied heavily on the study for projections of future tax and water and sewer revenue. The study does not take account of the possibility of a rollback on property taxes as potentially crafted by the Legislature and placed on this year’s ballot. Such a rollback would upend the study’s projections. 

Barbara Revels, the former county commissioner, raised that very issue Thursday evening. “If the state does away with homestead exemption property taxes for homesteaded properties, that means all of the taxes to operate your community is going to shift to non-homesteaded properties, which is the bulk of our property in this community,” Revels said. “That leaves it to commercial property owners, rental property owners.” Revels said her current rental properties are very affordable, but the shift would be “devastating to this community.” 

Revels cautioned the commission against banking on “all of the purported tax revenue you’re going to be so enriched with” without a proper economic analysis. “You’re going to be highly mistaken or surprised if that goes through.”

Utilities are yet another question. Existing demand for water in Flagler Beach is 930,000 gallons per day. Summertown’s projected 1,640 housing units would add 3,411 people to the city’s population, creating a demand for an additional 426,000 gallons per day, for a total of 1.36 million gallons per day. The city has pledged sufficient capacity to meet the demand. It is financing an expansion of its sewer plant, but a far more expensive one than originally planned: at last count, construction costs were 320 percent higher than when first proposed in 2020. R.J. Santore, a candidate for next March’s election to the commission, questioned the city’s transparency on the utilities plan, among other issues that prompted his unsuccessful request for a continuance of the proposal. 

John Tanner, a John Anderson Highway resident and the attorney representing Preserve Flagler Beach and Bulow Creek, said the debt the city will incur to pay for the new sewer plant will be the residents’ burden. Brynn Newton, a resident of unincorporated Flagler County, had written a lengthy letter to city and county commissioners, asking for the number of units to be limited to the 453 originally approved in 2019. 

There were voices in support of annexation other than the property appraiser. Toby Tobin, the Realtor and frequent champion of development, spoke in favor of the project. “Flagler County is adding approximately 5000 new residents per year,” he said, an exaggeration that cited now-outdated figures that were briefly true for a couple of years after Covid. The county’s labor force has stalled for the last two years. “Growth is inevitable. It’s not inherently bad.” 

John Phillips, president of the local chamber of commerce (where Chiumento, as an executive board member, was among those hiring him), credited a “spirit of cooperation” and compromise that brought the item to a vote. 

“Summertown represents a thoughtful, low density opportunity to create a vibrant, walkable town center that complements rather than overwhelms, the unique character of Flagler Beach,” Belshe said. He referred to Flagler Beach as one of the few cities he knows of that are named after a real estate developer, a reference to Henry Flagler. (Before building the Florida East Coast Railway in exchange for gigantic land grants, Flagler made his fortune as Standard Oil’s ruthless architect and enforcer of a monopoly the Supreme Court eventually ordered broken up.)

“Imagine,” Belshe continued, “up to 1,620 homes, apartments and condominiums spread across more than 545 acres, averaging just three units per acre, blended with 840,000 square feet of retail restaurants, offices and a 250-room boutique hotel. This isn’t just a housing development, it’s a complete community with an internal road system, trails, parks and open spaces, which, by the way, will make up over 40 percent of the land.”

“The deed is done,” City Commissioner Rick Belhumeur said soon after the end of the meeting, which neared the five-hour mark.