by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
No matter where you drive in either St. Johns, Duval or Clay counties, you can see that development is still in full swing.
Bonnie Barnes, executive director of the St. Johns Vision; Mike Saylor, the former director of planning and development for the City of Jacksonville; and Holly Parish, board member of the Clay County Board of County Commissions gave the Commercial Real Estate Women of Jacksonville updates on what is happening each of their areas at their monthly meeting held at the Southpoint Marriott. The panel moderator was Melissa Gross-Arnold with Lewis, Longman & Walker.
“St. Johns County is exploding,” said Barnes. “Nocatee is fully under development and there are 14 Development of Regional Impacts that are currently approved and three more that are in the early stage. There is just a lot of development county-wide.”
Barnes said there is a lot of redevelopment going on in Vilano Beach and in West Augustine.
“We have runaway development county-wide,” said Saylor. “But, 75 percent of the activity has been in Council District 11 (North and West Jacksonville.) That is where we seen the most activity especially in land use as far as converting agricultural land to other uses, primarily residential.
“Residential has been going gangbusters in Duval County for five straight years. We have been gobbling up industrial, commercial and agricultural land to convert for creating residential inventory. The big activity is sort of in the outer fringe of Duval County.”
Saylor added that we should see more commercial activity on the arterial roads and more DRI activity on Duval County.
Said Parish: “We are the bedroom community to Jacksonville and are primarily residential in nature. We do have commercial development in Clay County, but it’s been primarily within our DRI’s. We have two new DRI’s coming online and they will have a commercial component to them. Physically we have a lot of retail space and we are trying to cut that back and get more office and industrial uses.”
When asked where to look for development in the near future, all three speakers said to follow the infrastructure.
“Take a look at where the infrastructure is, where the road widening and road construction are going,” said Saylor.
Saylor said to look at the Department of Transportation plans for roads, where water and sewer are being installed and JEA’s business plan of what they are planning the next five years.
“That will pretty much indicate to you where the commercial quadrants are going to be,” said Saylor. “If you want a picture of the future, just follow the infrastructure. Frankly, we lost control of it in the Planning Department and they are just trying to catch up.”
In Duval County, Saylor said that they want infill development in redevelopment areas, but that impact fees have pushed development to the fringe of the county, where they really didn’t want it.
“When you start putting $14 million impact fees on redevelopment projects, you just drive them into the ground and make them not feasible,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do. We need to clean up our comprehensive plan, clean up our incentives to business ventures and coming up with a better, fairer Fair Share plan. We are working on all those things simultaneously. The analogy is that we are trying to tie our shoes while running a 100 yard dash.”
Continuing with that idea, Barnes said that one of the areas in St. Johns County that is really taking off is around World Golf Village where infrastructure has been in place for some time.
Parish said that the development in Clay County is mostly going north of SR 16 where infrastructure and DRI’s already exist.
“Growth will go where the infrastructure and services already are,” said Parish.
Others issues discussed were concurrency, workforce housing and impact fees.