Although the author of this piece laughingly swats the study aside, we did a thorough analysis with all the numbers (to the penny) and all the math to justify doing so. Read our analysis and here.
Westward Expansion:
The Study? Give Me a Break.
The paperwork that started this was signed in 2010. , a couple months apart, back when the land west of U.S. 1 was still pine and pulpwood and nobody in town could have told you what a Neoga was.
Next Tuesday, it gets decided.
Annexations. The land use map. . First reading, all of it, one agenda. Sixteen years of paper, and the clock on it now runs in days.
Last week, from the dais, Councilman Charles Gambaro made the case for it. He talked for four minutes. Eight million square feet of commercial space, he said. Construction jobs in the tens of thousands. Amendment 3, and a tax base still running over ninety percent residential.
Eight million square feet sounds enormous until you drive down 95 into Daytona and look at what’s already standing there. The distribution centers along that corridor run about a million square feet apiece.
Eight million square feet is not a lot.
He wasn’t wrong that this town needs a broader tax base. He was just late, and looking the wrong direction.
Because we had one coming. The council that ran this place before this one spent its time doing the opposite — taking what could have been commercial and turning it residential, rooftop after rooftop, and then crowing about how low they’d kept the taxes.
Alfin. Danko. Klufas.
They kept them low the way you turn the radio up when the car starts making a noise that sounds expensive.
The water and sewer systems were falling behind the whole time, and they knew, because the study they commissioned told them so. What happened to the department head who raised the alarm about it after that study came back? He was demoted.
So here we are, paying more now than we ever would have paid then, because infrastructure doesn’t wait politely while a council decides it would rather not be the one to raise a rate.
In four minutes, Gambaro did not say the word water.
He did not say sewer. He did not say capacity. He did not say treatment plant. Not once, in the whole pitch, on the one question that has driven every hard vote taken in that room since this council was seated.
That question already has an answer on the record. In March of last year, Mayor Norris pulled staff to the podium at a special workshop and asked whether the system could handle the nineteen thousand homes already approved and waiting.
Oh, no, sir.
Even with both bonds?
No, sir.
Nineteen thousand was just the city. Norris didn’t stop there. A week or so ago, he asked staff for the county’s number too: the homes already queued up out there that Palm Coast will be obligated to serve. That figure stacks on top of the nineteen thousand. Neither number includes a single house in this deal.
Few noticed it.
One wonders what that number is.
The study Gambaro was waving around says the whole thing pays for itself and then some. It’s laughable, because it assumes impact fees will cover the way, and that water and sewer are one quick and easy connect away. Charles Pennyfeather went through it line by line and has the full accounting. Read it. Then read the study itself — we published that too, so you don’t have to take anybody’s word for it, including ours.
Which brings us back to that same meeting, and one last thing.
When the county’s attorney and the school board’s attorney showed up at the planning board to say what this project would cost the people they work for — four thousand four hundred students, a seventy-seven million dollar hole after impact fees — a lot of this town stood up and cheered. Somebody finally came and did the arithmetic out loud.
Gambaro’s response, six days later, was that the man was “freelancing.” That he didn’t have authorization to be in the room. That it was “unprofessional and unacceptable,” and he wasn’t sure what the attorney’s “personal agenda” was.
He looked forward, he said, to addressing it face to face.
Where I come from, those are fighting words. Anywhere, they’re totally inappropriate.
Six days.
Sixteen years of contractual commitments, two development orders, a hundred million dollars of road that somebody promised to build and somebody else is now going to pay for — and it comes down to a first reading on a Tuesday night in August, in a room that holds maybe two hundred people.
Stay tuned for our four-part series leading up to the vote.
Westward Expansion:
….The Origin Story
….DRI / MPD: What’s the Diff?
….Anomalies and Oddities
….Scoring the Vote from the Record
We’ll be there. Bring a chair.