How Taxpayers Got Stiffed on the Tab for the Loop Road
In 2010, a private developer signed a contract agreeing to build the roads. In 2021, a city council voted to have Florida taxpayers build them instead — and nobody in that room knew what had already been signed.
On October 5, 2010, the Palm Coast City Council signed a contract with a private developer. The developer got the right to build a city. The public got a promise.
The promise was specific. It was legally binding. It was seventy pages long. And it sat in the public record for fourteen years until a sitting council member read it.
When she did, she said she was sick to her stomach.
The document is called the Neoga Lakes Development of Regional Impact Development Order. The developer was Neoga Lakes, LLC — a Delaware limited liability company that is, for all practical purposes, Rayonier Advanced Materials, operating through its real estate arm, Raydient Places + Properties.
In exchange for the right to develop approximately 6,410 acres west of the railroad tracks in Palm Coast, the developer agreed to build roads. Not to lobby for roads. Not to request that someone else fund the roads. To build them. At their expense. As a condition of development.
The document says so on page 42. Special Condition 25. Transportation Mitigation Plan. The developer’s contractual commitment was specific: mitigate for proportionate share transportation impacts. The development rights provided for in this Development Order are conditioned upon contribution of money and transportation improvements having an estimated 2010 cost of $109,782,519.
The roads are named. Hargrove Grade Road. The Palm Coast Parkway Extension. Otis Stone Hunter Road. A US 1 widening project. Each one specified. Each one the developer’s contractual commitment. The ink was dry in 2010.
Nothing was built. No homes. No roads. No development. Rayonier sat on the land, continued timber operations — which the Development Order explicitly permitted — and watched the market.
The contractual commitment was still there. The signatures were still there.
Until, quietly, they weren’t.
On the morning of August 10, 2021, the Palm Coast City Council held a workshop. It was audio-only — the city’s standing policy for workshops at the time — which meant no video, no YouTube recording, no auto-generated transcript. The only written record of what was said that morning would be the official minutes produced by the city clerk — until we came along.
City Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo presented the city’s 2022 state legislative priorities. Three items. The Northeast Florida Regional Planning Council — NEFRC — asks member municipalities to submit three priorities each year.
Priority 1 was a lifeline — power restoration for thirty thousand residents on pre-treatment septic systems, known as PEP tanks, during storms. When the power goes out, those systems fail. Thirty thousand people. Priority 2 was Old Kings Road. A road the city had been planning for years. Both were legitimate public needs.
Priority 3 was described as transportation access to the west.
“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… This priority would ask the legislature to support transportation projects that would improve that access to those large land tracks.”
— Jason DeLorenzo, Chief of Staff, City of Palm Coast · August 10, 2021 Workshop · Timestamp 9:45
Large land tracks.
That meeting was audio-only. No video. No YouTube. We went and got the audio from the city’s own media server, pulled the Priority 3 segment, and built a video — speaker cards, council member names, the full presentation. When we played it back, that line got sticky.
To be fair to the people sitting at that dais — they were not asleep at the switch. They were told what they were told. Nobody put the seventy-page Development Order on the table. Nobody said: before we ask Tallahassee for this money, here is what a private corporation already agreed to pay. The council voted on what they were given. What they weren’t given is the story. Somebody in that room knew about the contract. You decide what to make of that.
DeLorenzo presented those priorities. He knew what the numbers meant. Two years later, when a council member asked him directly whether the priorities were ranked, he told her twice they were not.
Not a word about Rayonier. Not a word about Raydient. Not a word about the Development Order signed eleven years earlier — the one that established a contractual commitment for the developer to build those roads at their own expense, at an estimated cost of $109 million.
Not a word about the contractual commitment sitting in a seventy-page document at City Hall.
The council asked no questions about Priority 3. None. The item passed in silence. The minutes gave it eleven words.
One week later, August 17, 2021 — the formal vote. A resolution. Four to zero. Priority 3 was approved and transmitted to Flagler County, then to the NEFRC, then toward Tallahassee. The Southern Group — Palm Coast’s lobbying firm — worked the delegation. Speaker Paul Renner delivered. The appropriation came through.
The contractual commitment moved. From the developer’s ledger to the public’s.
It took fourteen years for someone to read the contract.
Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri read it. All 250 pages of the Neoga Lakes DRI. This is what she does — when something comes before the council, she reads the source document, not the summary. In this case, the city was being asked to accept a new land use category — Master Plan Mixed Use — that would replace the existing Development Orders for the westward expansion area. She wanted to know what was being traded away.
On September 3, 2024, she brought what she found to the city council floor.
“I was floored at what I read. I was disgusted. I was truly sick to my stomach. Because it has come to my attention that a lot of the infrastructure that the current multi-billion dollar land owner was supposed to put in for us — taxpayers are paying for — and they are paying for it in the form of State Appropriations.”
— Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri · September 3, 2024 City Council Meeting · Timestamp ~4:10:25
That was September 2024. By April 2026, she had seen enough of where things were heading. The developer filed a new Master Plan Document — 117 pages proposing to replace the existing Development Orders entirely. She read that one too.
There is a document on file with the City of Palm Coast. It was signed October 5, 2010. It says the developer shall cause to be constructed and dedicated to the city an extension of Palm Coast Parkway. It says the developer shall cause Hargrove Grade Road to be reconstructed. It says the developer shall cause Otis Stone Hunter Road to be reconstructed. It says the developer shall be solely responsible for all costs.
Florida taxpayers paid $105 million for what that document required a private corporation to build.
The document was always there. In the public record. Accessible to anyone willing to look.
Nobody looked for fourteen years.
The contractual commitment was theirs. The bill is yours.
The contract that says so has been on file since 2010.
The Neoga Lakes Development of Regional Impact Development Order. Signed October 5, 2010. Seventy pages. Special Condition 25, page 42: the developer’s contractual commitment to build and pay for the roads. Estimated cost at the time of signing: $109,782,519. This is the document that started everything.
The verbatim transcript of the August 10, 2021 Palm Coast City Council Workshop — the audio-only meeting where Priority 3 was presented. This transcript does not exist in any official city record. We made it from the city’s own audio. It is the only verbatim record of what was said that morning. The minutes gave Priority 3 eleven words. We gave it its full voice.
The official minutes of the August 10, 2021 workshop. Priority 3 appears as: “requesting support of transportation projects that will improve access to large land tracts on the west side of Palm Coast.” Eleven words for a $109 million contractual commitment that would eventually become a $105 million public appropriation.
The formal resolution, August 17, 2021. Four to zero. Priority 3 — transportation access to the west — was approved and sent up the chain to Flagler County, then to the NEFRC, then to Tallahassee. The Southern Group took it from there. One week after a workshop with no video and no questions, the public was on the hook.
August 8, 2023. The Southern Group presents the FY2024 legislative priorities. Vice Mayor Pontieri asks directly: are these ranked? Jason DeLorenzo says twice they are not. The 2021 workshop minutes — which he presented — show three explicitly numbered priorities with explicit short-term and long-term designations. The video of this exchange is here. We ran it through voice stress analysis — see D6 for the full report and what we found.
Voice Stress Analysis Examination Report WEI-2026-001. We found Praat — the open-source acoustic phonetics software used by forensic examiners and law enforcement worldwide — installed it, extracted the audio, and ran the same analysis protocol a sheriff’s office would use. At 14 seconds into the target clip, at the exact words “no particular order,” the instrument flagged an anomalous pitch spike. We are not saying he lied. The instrument found something at the exact moment, on the exact words. The full methodology and statement verification exhibit are here alongside the report. You decide.
Nobody asked her to read it. Nobody flagged it. She read it because that is what she does — when something comes before the council, she reads the source document, not the summary.
What she found: a private corporation had agreed in writing to build $109 million in roads as a condition of their development rights. The obligation ran with the land. It had teeth. Nobody enforced it. Nobody mentioned it.
By the time Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri sat down with that document, $105 million in Florida tax dollars had already paid for what a private multi-billion dollar company was legally required to build.
She brought it to the dais on September 3, 2024. On the record. In public. This is that moment.
Somebody filled out a form in Tallahassee. It is called a Local Funding Initiative Request — a LFIR. This one is for Phase 3 of the loop road. Filed January 4, 2024. Senate sponsor: Travis Hutson. The ask: funds for right-of-way acquisition, design, permitting, and construction of a multi-lane road extending Palm Coast Parkway over the Florida East Coast Railway — opening 20,000 acres of land that a private corporation had a contractual commitment to serve. The form is public record. It is in this library.
Further reading For more on how LFIRs work, read R. Whitmore Gaines, Esq. (Ret.)’s explainer →Remember Priority 1? Power restoration for thirty thousand Palm Coast residents on PEP tanks — the people who lose their systems in a storm. The council voted it their top legislative priority on August 17, 2021. The first LFIR ever filed for that project was filed on March 6, 2025. Three years, six months, and seventeen days later. By that time, the loop road — Priority 3 — had already pulled in $25 million in FY2023-24 and $80 million in FY2024-25. Priority 1 had pulled in zero. This is the form. It is also in this library.
April 14, 2026. Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri had read every page of the developer’s 117-page Master Plan Document. She tells the council what she found. The MPD strips out developer obligations that were written into the existing Development Orders: the sports complex, the Olympic pool, the sports fields — all previously required, all gone. Ten thousand additional dwelling units added. Phase requirements with no enforcement teeth. She closes with a direct ultimatum to the landowner: two years of talking to a wall. One final ask — fix it. She will not accept it as written.
Master Planned Development Agreement between the City of Palm Coast and Raydient Palm Coast LLC. Filed March 23, 2026. Not yet executed — signature lines blank. Covers approximately 20,214 acres west of U.S. 1. Key recital: the City Council, contemporaneously with approving this MPD, abandoned both the Old Brick Township DRI and the Neoga Lakes DRI — declared them of no further force or effect. Those DRIs required the developer to build the Palm Coast Parkway Extension and Matanzas Woods Parkway Extension — obligations worth approximately $178 million in 2010 dollars. The MPD replaces those enforceable obligations with a road dedication framework funded primarily through impact fees and tax increment financing. Raydient is authorized for 22,000 homes. The original DRIs authorized 12,000. Obtained via Chapter 119 open records request.
City of Palm Coast staff comments on the Raydient MPD Agreement. Eight city departments independently flagging major concerns: infrastructure funding via proportionate share likely insufficient; only entry and exit for the first two phases is Matanzas Woods Parkway; nothing in the MPD addresses existing infrastructure impacts; no school mitigation agreement; agreement language implies the MPD supersedes the Charter, the Comprehensive Plan, and the Code of Ordinances. One Senior Planner wrote: “if this project does not want City staff, City Council, or Residents of Palm Coast know what they are building, perhaps this project is better incorporating as its own jurisdiction.” Utility agreement absent. Package treatment plants permitted. No future public hearings required after MPD approval. Obtained via Chapter 119 open records request.