The red tape has become a little less tangled when it comes to getting mega-communities like Nocatee or OakLeaf off the ground.
Developments of Regional Impact are going away.
Created by Florida law in 1972, DRIs regulate projects like huge shopping malls, office parks or major housing developments by requiring review and comment from state agencies and affected cities and counties.
The process allowed governments to request mitigation for impacts to traffic, water, wastewater, affordable housing and schools. But, developers often found it was time consuming and expensive.
The Community Development Act goes into effect Wednesday. Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, sponsored the measure.
Simpson wrote in a policy paper that DRIs were never supposed to be permanent. They were supposed to be replaced by individual counties’ comprehensive planning process, signed into law a few years after DRI passage.
Instead, dense/multiuse developments went through two processes that covered similar issues, he said. Also DRIs pushed builders toward smaller, uncoordinated projects, promoting urban sprawl.
Jacksonville developer Curtis Hart said he expects the disappearance of DRIs will probably save builders some headaches.
Under the process, a development had to exceed a certain number of homes before it would qualify for review. The threshold varied by county and was determined by population. For example, DRI review in St. Johns County kicked in for any development over 1,000 homes.
But, things got complicated when building near a county border.
For developments within one mile of a county line, the threshold of the smaller county applied, Hart said. In Duval County for example, the threshold was 3,000 homes, compared to 1,000 in St. Johns. Builders worked around the rules.
“You might be limited to developing under 1,000 units in order to avoid the DRI oversight,” Hart said.
There’s been a movement to roll back DRIs for almost 20 years, said Ed Lehman, Clay County Planning and Zoning director. He formerly worked for the Northeast Florida Regional Council, which oversaw the DRI review process.
A few years ago, Florida passed a law that exempted several dense counties from DRI review, including Duval, because they were already highly urbanized, he said.
The 2015 law though is the first time DRIs have been eliminated altogether.
Traffic mitigation was always the most expensive DRI item, Lehman said. DRIs in Clay County, for example, paid to four-lane U.S. 17.
The cost and complexity of DRI review likely means builders and developers will be happy to see it go, Lehman said.
He reflected, though, that some of the region’s better projects — Nocatee, Eagle Harbor and Pace Island — were built under DRI law. In 2006, St. Johns County had eight active DRIs, more than any county in Florida.
Lehman agreed with Simpson that large county projects are now managed effectively by the comprehensive review process.
Still, he’s curious to see what happens now when a development is proposed right against the border of a neighboring county. One that impacts traffic or otherwise pressures a neighbor.
“No county ordinance addresses impacts with another county, and now there’s no process for handling that,” he said.
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