Westward Expansion:
Will Special Taxing District Open the Door?
It’s 3:47 p.m., Thursday, July 30. We get a tip. The agenda has been released.
Westward Expansion is on it. First reading, Tuesday night.
Fifteen days before, the Planning and Land Development Regulation Board had voted it down. Five to nothing. Not on whether to build west — on not having enough information about who pays for the roads, the utilities, the schools. Then it came off the Council agenda.
Now it’s back.
So: was it changed?
Two versions of the same agreement, roughly twelve hundred pages apiece. The June 30 draft, and the one filed for Tuesday. We read them against each other, line by line.
It was changed. Industrial up better than seventy percent. Two thousand single-family attached units cut. The employment center grown by a few hundred acres. Two provisions added that hadn’t been there before.
That ran here before the hearing. Anyone who wanted it had it before Council sat down.
But what the applicant’s own consultant put before the council was wrong. It didn’t include the school district’s new numbers, or the two thousand units already cut.
That led to one of many efforts to table the deal.
Then, there were the farm animals (other than horses). In Palm Coast. Wait, what?
Then, the great revelation. To the mayor’s pointed question — “How much is the city going to have to spend in the next three years to get this going?” — the answer: “I’m not aware of any capital that the city’s going to have to put in.” And a stewardship district was added to the mix.
So what is it.
It’s a government. Not a homeowners association, not a special deal with the city — an actual unit of local government, separate from Palm Coast, with its own board and its own power to bill you.
A city can create a community development district on its own. It can’t create one of these. A stewardship district takes an act of the Florida Legislature — a bill, filed and passed in Tallahassee, written specifically for this piece of ground.
Once it exists, it can build the roads and the drainage. It can borrow money to do it. And it can put a charge on your property every year to pay that debt back, plus whatever it costs to run the place.
That charge lands on your county tax bill. Not instead of your city taxes, your county taxes, or your school taxes. On top of them. It isn’t a HOA fee — you’ll pay that separately, to somebody else. And it doesn’t move with the value of your house or with what you earn. It tracks the bonds. The bonds run thirty years.
Now, who decides what gets built and how much you owe.
In the districts built on this model, the board isn’t elected the way you’re used to. It’s one vote per acre. The golden rule: he with the most gold rules.
The landowner elects the board. The board levies the assessment. The assessment pays for the infrastructure the landowner is building.
That flips to resident control eventually. When, and on what terms, is written into the enabling act.
Council didn’t have to imagine any of this. The applicant brought the example itself.
“That’s what you got going on up in Nassau County.”
“Correct.”
The place is called Wildlight, outside Yulee. Same developer. The district that runs it was created by the Legislature in 2017, and it has been billing households there ever since.
The mayor had already gone and looked. “When I asked your representatives when I went up there, what is the millage rate in Nassau County and Wildlight?”
What a household inside that district actually pays — the smallest lots and the larger ones, the general fund, the operations, the debt service, all of it on the county tax bill — Charles Pennyfeather has the budget, line by line.
And there’s one more thing in the Nassau County record. When the question came up of whether creating that district let the county off the hook for its own obligations — parks, in that case — a circuit court answered it. Pennyfeather has that too.
So what’s left yet to deal?
Everything. The six agreements covering the utility agreement, water, sewer, the roads, concurrency, and the schools.
What’s new is the stewardship district.