The Day Bunnell Shook with Groundbreakings: New City Hall, New Road, New Urban Horizon

Thirteen years ago Bunnell Mayor Catherine Robinson stood near the intersection of State Road 100 and Commerce Parkway for a groundbreaking, back when Commerce Parkway dead-ended at the Baptist church, back when there was no Wendy’s, and the parkway itself was just a plan on a shelf. The groundbreaking was for what was to be Commerce Park, a 1 million square foot commercial development along the imagined parkway. But all that was build since is a Wendy’s, and all that could have be fairly and legitimately said since was: where’s the beef?




It was a different story today as Bunnell and county government held a pair of groundbreakings, the first for what will be Bunnell’s $10.5 million, 19,000 square foot City Hall, with 5,500 square feet of that for the Bunnell Police Department, a short distance south from Wendy’s. The second groundbreaking was a joint celebration of the digging of Commerce Parkway itself, the $14.5 million, 1.7-mile stretch of new road shearing through dense forest, wetlands and brush to connect State Road 100 with U.S. 1, around Bunnell’s south and southeastern flank. (The cost includes design and utilities work.)

The road, paid for with state, county and city dollars and to be maintained by Bunnell, is expected to open that section of the city to vast new developments. It already has: City Manager Alvin Jackson said a housing complex that will include town homes, apartments and condos is soon to rise behind City Hall, an 18,000 square foot medical office building is to rise on the parcel just south of City Hall, and a light industrial complex has been permitted at the south juncture of Commerce Parkway and U.S. 1, an Empire Mesa Developments project.

The road is expected to be completed next spring. City Hall is expected to be completed next summer. And somewhere along the way, the county’s South Branch Library is expected to break its own ground on a 22,000 square-foot, $16 million “Nexus Center,” on the parcel between the Baptist church and, across the street, the Sheriff’s Operations Center, which was dedicated two years ago. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the two lanes of 1.7-mile-Commerce Parkway will be sufficient to handle the flow, should all the lands it traverses develop as planned and the added traffic from U.S. 1 and State Road 100, with bypasses on its mind, take advantage of the route.

All in all, quite the difference with 2011, when hope, just hope, was the prevailing development. Today, the two groundbreakings were the real thing: most of Commerce Parkway has already been dug through almost to U.S. 1, its . City Hall land is all but razed, with mounds of lumber getting chipped and hauled off. The ceremonial groundbreaking intruded on the actual work, but no one was complaining.




Jackson, customarily beaming with confidence, was just about combusting with it today, with Bunnell City Commissioner John Rogers, Sheriff Rick Staly and  County Commission Chair Andy Dance at different points appropriating Jackson’s trademark–and unofficial, for now–slogan: “It’s a great day in Bunnell.” (Dance gave credit, and Rogers went one better: “It’s a wonderful day for the city and the citizens of Bunnell.”)

“What’s exciting about a healthy community is when you get economic diversification and this is what it is,” Jackson said. “Basically it has happened organically, the best way to make that happen. So when we talk about even the CRA, the community redevelopment agency–this is community development.”

Though it wasn’t explicitly spoken of that way, the opening of Commerce Parkway may re-balance the city geographically and economically. Setting aside Bunnell’s vast, strange annexations of thousands of acres of nowhere lands south of the city two decades ago, Bunnell proper has been growing in leaps north of the city, with the Grand Reserve development. But that’s an entirely residential development of single-family homes. The opening of Commerce Parkway will rebalance that at the south end of the city with a greater mixture commercial, industrial and residential development, all built on what Jackson describes as “islands” amid the wetlands. Surprisingly, any alarms about the potential environmental wreckage of those wetlands has been muted, though the Supreme Court last year gave such wreckage its blessing, in the absence of state controls.

Today, however, all attention was beyond the possible, to the realizable.

“I’m humbled to say that I’m still here to see the completion of the project,” Robinson said.  She recalled how Carol Oar, of Oar Associates–the company and family that planned to develop Commerce Park at the Wendy’s groundbreaking, and that owns most of the land along the future Commerce Parkway–had spoken to the city about her vision for development there. She ceded rights of way. There’d been plans by the Department of Transportation for a bypass north of the city, to accommodate future Palm Coast developments. That died in the face of serious opposition. Commerce Parkway’s bypass simmered, then got funded with an state appropriation by Rep. Paul Renner–who was supposed to be at the groundbreaking, but couldn’t make it–and the city and the county got busy.




“I can’t wait until I can walk the 1.7 miles and pop open on U.S. 1  and see the beauty of the country we live in through those woods and the wildlife and all of that we’re going to see as this development continues,” Robinson said, calling progress a double-edged sword. “I did not see that this road would ever get built. I didn’t know we were going to need a new city hall, and so as time has gone on, the dream has resurrected itself. We work through the nightmare of negotiations and funding. And here we are today.”

Commerce Parkway will also enable a secondary road out of the sheriff’s complex, but that’s secondary compared to what it will also enable: “It allows us to speed up response times to South U.S. 1 without having to go through downtown Bunnell into traffic lights and so forth to get there so we now will have a north south egress to the county,” Sheriff Rick Staly said. Patrol deputies don’t work out of the operations center, but detectives and “a litany of other services” do, “so this is a great day.”