There's a moment in the August 10, 2021 Palm Coast City Council Workshop that has nothing to do with roads or lobbyists or $25 million in taxpayer money.
A youth soccer coach named Mark Caine is at the podium. He runs a program that never turns a kid away. They give out scholarships, he says.
Vice Mayor Eddie Branquinho leans into his microphone. Do they actually give scholarships for kids?
Yes, the coach says.
Branquinho says he'll give $500. In honor of his son Marco. Soccer was Marco's favorite sport.
That's who Eddie Branquinho is. That's the man who was in that room.
Later that morning, City Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo presented the 2022 state legislative priorities. The Northeast Florida Regional Planning Council asks member municipalities to submit three priorities each year. Palm Coast had three.
Priority 1: restore power to PEP neighborhoods after a storm. Thirty thousand residents on pre-treatment septic systems. When the power goes out, the pumps stop. The effluent backs up into people's homes. A lifeline function, DeLorenzo called it.
Priority 2: fund phases two and three of Old Kings Road. Already in the planning pipeline. A road Palm Coast needed.
Priority 3: transportation access to the west.
Here is what DeLorenzo said, in his own words, on the record:
"Part of three is a new one. And this is looking towards a Western expansion of the city. So we have about 12,000 acres currently within the municipal boundaries, west of the railroad tracks with very limited access. One of the things identified was that we want to do an evaluation of three additional roadways — Matanzas Woods, White View Parkway, and Pomko's Parkway — to understand what are the best places to start to look to access the Western portions of the city. This priority would ask the legislature to support transportation projects that would improve that access to those large land tracks."
Large land tracks.
Not residents. Not community infrastructure. Not a safety need or a planning imperative.
Large land tracks.
The council heard those words. Nobody asked a single question about Priority 3. Not one. Not who owned the land. Not what it would cost. Not whether anyone had a legal obligation to build that road already.
Branquinho's response: "Priorities 1 and 2 are no-brainers."
He said nothing about Priority 3. Because there was nothing to say. Nobody gave him anything to work with.
What DeLorenzo did not say — what no one in that room said — is that those "large land tracks" were owned by Rayonier Advanced Materials, a $4.6 billion timber and real estate company operating under the name Raydient Places + Properties.
What DeLorenzo did not say is that Rayonier had signed Development Orders — legally binding agreements with Palm Coast — requiring them to build that western road at their own expense as a condition of developing those 12,000 acres.
What DeLorenzo did not say is that Priority 3 was not a community infrastructure request. It was a legislative ask to have Florida taxpayers fund something a private corporation was already contractually required to pay for.
Eleven words in the meeting minutes. Forty seconds on the record. And a council that had no idea what it was being asked to approve.
A week later, August 17, the formal vote. DeLorenzo again: no changes from the workshop. Three bullet points. Motion to approve. Second. All in favor.
Four to zero. Branquinho voted aye.
He had no idea that vote would eventually become the predicate for $25 million in state appropriations — later $31.5 million, with Palm Coast adding another $6.5 million in impact fees — going to build a road that Rayonier's own signed agreement required them to fund.
He had no idea. He trusted the people in that room to tell him what he needed to know.
They didn't.
Eddie Branquinho is not a villain in this story.
He is a former military man who showed up, did his job, and trusted his staff. He is a Vice Mayor who thanked people by name and meant it. He is a father who lost a son and still looked for ways to give something back — $500 to a soccer program, in Marco's name, on the same morning he cast a vote he didn't have the information to understand.
The victims here are not elected officials. The victims are Palm Coast taxpayers — residents who paid $31.5 million in state money and another $6.5 million in local impact fees to build a road that a $4.6 billion private corporation was already legally required to fund.
Branquinho didn't do that to them. But his vote made it possible. Not because he was corrupt. Not because he was careless. Because the people responsible for telling him what he needed to know chose not to.
That is the question this investigation is asking.
Not what Eddie Branquinho knew.
What he was never told. And why.
Eddie Branquinho did his job.
The question is whether the people briefing him did theirs.
— Johnny Diamond
PalmCoastStorylines.com