
It was a grind of déjà vu at the Palm Coast Planning Board Wednesday evening as yet another company seeking to rezone land and build a concrete batch plant on Hargrove Grade ran into a crush of public opposition and questions from the board, which proved unwilling to make a decision just yet.
In June the Palm Coast Planning Board decisively rejected recommending approval of a rezoning on Hargrove Lane that would have allowed an SMR Concrete plant on 37 acres. After some hesitation, the City Council, which has final say, rejected the rezoning.
On Wednesday, a different company, Hard Rock Materials, applied for a similar rezoning of 10.5 acres a short distance away, on Hargrove Grade, from light industrial to heavy industrial, so the company could build a smaller concrete batch plant than the one proposed at the other site. It would employ 22 people full-time. It would not have extended hours. (See Hard Rock’s presentation here.)
Hard Rock, which has a plant in Elkton and employs local residents for it, had been working on the proposal with the city for nine months. “We were kind of taken aback,” Michael Chiumento, the land-use attorney representing Hard Rock, said, “we had no idea there was another applicant in town doing something similar, not the same thing, but similar. So we followed it very closely. We reviewed every single comment made in public about that project. We reviewed the city council meetings and came up with a series of issues that were important to the citizens as well as City Council. So after nine months of working with the city, we’re here today to kind of get through this.”
Chiumento said the plant would not come close to the intensity of the SMR proposal.
It did not go through. Not yet, anyway. The Planning Board was too hesitant, what with the recent history of the City Council’s unanimous rejection of the other plant and other issues. The board opted to postpone a decision until February.
Unlike the Hargrove Lane proposal, the Hargrove Lane location does not neighbor nearly as many businesses in its vicinity or line of sight, though the property would face the intersection of Hargrove Grade and Hargrove Lane. It neighbors two properties already zoned heavy industrial, as it seeks to be. But the trucks would use Hargrove Grade to get to and from U.S. 1. (The city is conducting its own study to determine who much traffic goes in and out of the park overall.)
Traffic had been a central concern of other businesses in the Hargrove industrial park when SMR Concrete made its proposal. The business owners argued to the council that rumbling concrete trucks one after the other would create hazards, damage the road and change the complexion of their industrial park.
Hard Rock did not have precise numbers on its expected traffic, only saying that it would create an average of 27 trips at peak hour in the morning and seven afternoon peak-hour trips. The company would be willing to cap its truck trips to 200 a day and limit its concrete loads to 9 cubic yards per truck, so its vehicles weight would not exceed 68,000 pounds.
Hanson said by way of comparison that the largest of the city’s fire trucks weighs 75,000 pounds. But the comparison is a fallacy: the huge ladder truck does not travel any single road 200 times a day, not even its own fire station’s taxiways, and it is not the sort of truck that typically trundles out on medical calls regardless. Chiumento made a more relevant comparison: the site’s zoning would today, without changes, allow for a distribution warehouse that could generate up to 800 traffic trips a day.
The SMR’s location, near city water wells, was also a concern. The Hard Rock plant would also be near two city wells. “These particular potable water wells are at closest 1000 feet from the subject site,” City Senior Planner Michael Hanson said, “so this project kind of mirrors the previous site plan for the other one, as far as the location of water wells.”
Hard Rock proposes to use 20,000 gallons of water a day–contrary to an error in the documentation that states 8,000 gallons. The city does not expect that to impact the city’s wells, its staff said, but it wasn’t clear whether that was based on the 8,000 figure as opposed to the corrected figure of 20,000 gallons. It was corrected only at the end of Wednesday’s hearing, and unsettled some of the board members.
“The proposed rezoning is isolated to a single, 10.44 acre property within the industrial park,” Hanson said. “It’s unlikely to cause issues related to health, safety and welfare based on the proposed use.” The council, however, was worried about setting a precedent by rezoning the previous site, as it would open the way for other applications to do likewise elsewhere in the industrial park. Still, the city staff recommended approval of the rezoning.
The public reaction was not less intense than it was against the SMR plant. “This mirrors the exact thing that we just took to city council,” Catherine Hunter, a business tenant at 15 Hargrove Lane said. “We are an industrial-1 neighborhood,” she said, referring to the light industrial zoning designation. “We have businesses. We have promoted that industrial one neighborhood, and we are growing.”
The manager of Top Shelf Storage, the closest business to the Hard Rock land, echoed Hunter’s concerns, especially with chemicals in Sunbelt Chemicals, a nearby business, mixing with concrete dust in a community with no hazardous-materials emergency team. “My customers are coming to my property. I want them to feel safe coming to my property,” the manager said.
Several others spoke likewise, and added other concerns. “I would assume that this would be dead on arrival with the hearing last time,” Jeff Knapp said. “The main thing that they talked about last time, and the thing that shot everything down, was the precedent being set from going from industrial 1 to industrial 2. It’s not so much the concrete plant, which is unpleasant, but we already deal with Sunbelt. We’ve been evacuated from our businesses because of Sunbelt. Once the concrete plant goes away, that’s its own industrial 2, what can go in there after the fact?”
There was also the occasional outright falsehood, as when Chantal Pruninger, an unfailing attendee of City Council meetings who should know better (and a Z Section resident, far from Hargrove Grade), since she’s heard the myth debunked several times, claimed that the city secretly approved using recycled water as potable water. It’s not clear what that had to do with the batch plant, though she also spoke of traffic and cement dust.
The owner of Autohaus of Palm Coast put it more directly: “This will kill my business.”
Hard Rock had been willing to agree to several restrictions. “We can add to that,” Chiumento said, “we can tweak it. We can modify it. We’re here to talk about those things, if there are certain concerns that you may have, but we’re here to be partners with you all, particularly in light of the fact that we’ve been working with your economic development committee for about nine months.”
But there were too many pending, unanswered questions. So the board voted unanimously to push the proposal to its February agenda, by which time certain numbers, like those of a traffic study, would be available.
Really annoyed says
Whoever has the deeper pocket wins!