By Carole Hawkins, [email protected]
They were scared. They came out in force.
Word on the street among builders was the St. Johns County commissioners , or at least one of them, wanted to deny any new amendments to their comprehensive plan.
A comp plan is how local governments map out intended land use for the county. Typically, amendments to the plan are needed to rezone property for large developments.
Placing a moratorium on amendments would effectively halt any new development that isn’t already on the books.
More 100 people appeared —half from the building community, by one commissioner’s reckoning — at an Aug. 25 growth management workshop.
Before they discussed growth though, several commissioners vehemently denied any kind of moratorium was on the table.
“I don’t know where you ever heard that,” District 4 Commissioner Jay Morris said. “That is not what this meeting is all about. It’s about the consideration that we’ll have looking forward.”
The workshop was called so county staff could hear the commissioners’ ideas on planning and zoning, according to County Administrator Michael Wanchick.
Only one of the five commissioners has served more than four year, and staff has been working under policies established by previous commissions.
“Our job is to serve them,” Wanchick said. “We’d like to know in an informal setting, what concerns they have and whether we are on the right track.”
Staff — as well as builders and others — heard a few of the commissioners’ priorities.
District 3 Commissioner Bill McClure said in considering comp plan amendments, he looks for contiguous “hub-and-spoke” types of development where roads, schools, water/sewer, and public safety infrastructure are already in place to support the growth.
He referred to a map showing developments waiting for county approval, and said it was useful in understanding what’s coming.
While he favored new development within the established zones, he said the county should “stick to its determined policy” to encourage rooftops in certain areas versus creating urban sprawl.
District 4 Commissioner Rachael Bennett, though, said allowing only contiguous growth would leave large parts of the county without services. In the Southwest, for example, people must drive a long way to go to a Walmart and to jobs.
She favored instead, allowing for hubs of development in places where growth was already happening organically.
The county should strike a balance between the cost of infrastructure and allowing those hubs to occur.
Density was also an issue for Bennett, who wanted to see higher densities in certain places.
Several current zones allow maximum densities of one, two six or 13 homes per acre, she said, but none have a required minimum.
That can be a problem, for example, in the case of a mixed-use zone, which today is mainly being used for single-family subdivisions. “We’re seeing two-and-a-half units per acre, and it’s supposed to be one of our most intense land uses,” Bennett said.
Increasing density would help create infrastructure efficiencies.
“If you’ve got five houses in an area, it’s a whole lot cheaper to run a water line than if you’ve got one house, and one house, and one house,” she said.
Morris said he wasn’t as concerned about how to fit projects into defined zonings — that’s solvable, he said, on a case-by-case basis.
He was concerned though by how the county would pay for about $270 million in road and bridge maintenance that was deferred during the recession.
The county’s total budget is $619 million, still $114 million below what it was pre-recession.
“To me that looms out there — forget capital expenditures, which you’ve got to add on top of that,” he said.
Even with transportation impact fees, the county eventually takes over the roads developers build and thereafter, it pays to maintain them.
Commissioner Jeb Smith, who represents the largely rural District 2, said he was concerned by higher taxes, which go hand-in-hand with increasing land values. And, by what effect those would have on agriculture.
Smith said he has several family members who own large tracts of land in the rapidly developing county of Palm Beach, and he fears they soon will be taxed into selling.
“I have this very strong sense that that will be St. Johns County 30 years from now,” Smith said. “People will be forced, because of demand, into selling. They won’t be able to survive.”
At the same time, Smith was reluctant to remedy the issue through restrictive zoning.
He wondered instead if there was a way to offset tax impacts with government incentives, such as a Transferrable Development Rights program — a program that pays owners to sell the development rights for their land to the government, without actually selling the land.
“It’s a viable tool … that would allow the county to maintain a valuable agricultural asset,” he said.