Community meeting set for May 20 on proposed Chick-fil-A near North Creek neighborhood

Government

A community meeting is scheduled for May 20 to discuss a traffic study for a contested Chick-fil-A restaurant planned near the North Creek subdivision in North Jacksonville.

Jacksonville City Council member Reggie Gaffney Jr., whose District 8 includes the restaurant site, set the meeting for 6 p.m. at the Oceanway Community Center, 12215 Sago Ave. W.

According to the meeting notice, city traffic staff will be there to discuss the study.

A Chick-fil-A is planned along Lady Lake Road west of a Publix-anchored Duval Station Centre. Access to the fast food restaurant is from the North Creek subdivision to the west and through the Publix parking lot to the east.

At the April 16 meeting of the Council Land Use and Zoning Committee hearing, residents near the proposed restaurant expressed outrage that the required impact report for the project had been changed significantly hours before the meeting.

Neighbors said they had been prepared to point out what they described as numerous inaccuracies and discrepancies in the 600-page study. They instead discovered that the report they had read was a first draft and had been changed so recently that several LUZ committee members hadn’t seen the revised report.

Jacksonville Planning and Development Department is recommending approval, with conditions, for this plan dated Aug. 2023 for a Chick-fil-A adjacent to the North Creek subdivision across the street from First Coast High School.

Errors in the original draft included listing Duval Station Road as a four-lane, median-divided collector road when it is actually two lanes, neighbors said. LUZ Committee Chair Kevin Carrico used the power of his position to defer consideration of a rezoning request for the restaurant to June 4.

Chick-fil-A confirmed in early 2023 that it was planning a double-drive-thru restaurant on a vacant 1.39-acre site between Duval Station and Lady Lake roads near the Publix-anchored and -owned Duval Station Centre.

Those plans fizzled after an initial round of neighborhood opposition. They resurfaced in December 2023 when legislation for the rezoning request, Ordinance 2023-0856, was filed.