by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
You’d think the director of planning and development for the City of Jacksonville would come prepared for a speaking engagement....you know, plan ahead. But, not Mike Saylor, he made notes on what he would talk about on a notepad that he received at the meeting itself.
He didn’t need much planning, of course - his presentation was on his job, what’s going on in Jacksonville and how it all affects real estate, all areas which he knows very well.
Though he’s only been on the job for seven months, Saylor has many years experience in development and consulting in Jacksonville as the previous owner of BHR Engineering for the past 30 years.
“We specialized not really in municipal planning and zoning issues, but in big projects,” he said. “We were the land planners and engineers of record for big projects like the Riverwalk, Alltel Stadium and the baseball park. I’m really more of a project person on the commercial side, but last October, I got a call from the Mayor’s office. I was traveling and they called late on a Friday night in my hotel room.
“Susie Wiles (communications director for Mayor John Peyton) said that Jeannie Fewell, director of planning and development for the city, had resigned and they needed some help.
“I told her I’d look into my database and give her some names of people they might want to talk to and she said they really didn’t want to talk to anyone, they wanted me. I reminded her that I had a job, owned a company and really couldn’t extricate myself that easily.”
He said Wiles said she knew all that and she’d give him until Monday to think about it. He did think about it and had reached a point in his career where he had just merged his company with a larger engineering firm and knew he had a lot of traveling ahead of him and really didn’t want to do that, so he decided to take the job.
“I spend most of my time talking to prospects who are coming to Jacksonville, trying to understand the lay of the land and want to hook up with a commercial Realtor, land use attorney, engineer or architect planner to explore the opportunities to make a very big margin in Jacksonville because the dirt is so cheap,” he said. “Most of them are looking at the Northside. About 80 percent of the action we are seeing in planning and development is in Council District 11 (North and West Jacksonville.)
“ What my department does is recommendation for approval, denial or a request for modifications to a development proposal.”
He said another issue is affordable housing. Many of the condominium conversions have displaced renters leading to the need for more affordable housing. One thing he can do is “horse trade” with developers to get them to modify their projects to help the affordable housing issue.
“I horse traded the other day with a developer who wanted to build townhomes,” he said. “I convinced him that he probably ought to think about building rental garden apartments more on the workforce affordable price point and gave him an incentive for doing that.”
When he stepped into his new job, the news broke about the potential of realigning the Oceana Naval Mission moving back to Cecil Field.
“It was one of those things we were not expecting,” he said. “The city spent a lot of money, as you well know, improving and modernizing the infrastructure to make it ready for private sector development.”
He was thrown into the middle of that situation and spent the entire month of November working on that.
“Don’t look for Cecil Field to be converting back to Navy use unless something incredibly extraordinary happens in the next several months,” said Saylor. “So, that was just my first couple of months on the job.”
Saylor said his division is in the process of dealing with a very archaic zoning scheme and comprehensive plan.
“I have committed that we will redo both of them,” said Saylor. “It’s not an easy task. It took five years to write the comprehensive plan and I’m hoping to have it completely re-written to better reflect where we are in our current economy, marketplace and state of mind in the next two years.
“I’m hoping to have the zoning codes revamped. We are actually using model zoning codes provided by the department of housing and urban development in 1954. There is the need for some modernization in our zoning codes. We really need to focus on the marketplace and make our zoning codes reflective of the fact that we are a maturing city.”
Saylor is a member of the Growth Management Task Force, which is working on a comprehensive plan to include transportation, school concurrency, preservation of the river, preservation of industrial areas.
“Areas where we are seeing real estate pressure include private marinas, boat launches and ramps,” he said. “For every piece of dirt out there, there is an idea to do something different than what is there. The preservation task force is wrestling with the whole issue of preserving land so we can preserve enough area to have places to work for people that are moving to this town.
“What we are seeing is a conversion of every other land use category to residential to accommodate the influx of population. It’s all over the map. It’s all over the city.”
Saylor reiterated that it is an amazing real estate market all over Jacksonville and told the Realtors an interesting fact about the future of Jacksonville.
“We are under some new legislation that was passed last year, which is the new growth management bill for all of Florida,” he said. “It puts us in an interesting situation. We are now required to provide a vision of what Jacksonville will look like at its build out. The Growth Management Task Force concluded that we will reach a build-out state by 2025. All the real estate opportunities left will be infill and redevelopment.”