- March 3, 2025
The Flagler County Board of County Commissioners selected the county jail expansion, fire and medical emergency response times and renovations at Princess Place as upcoming priorities in a Sept. 19 strategic planning session.
Strategic planning sessions are scheduled periodically to allow commissioners to prioritize key county issues, spokesman Carl Laundrie said. Commissioners run through a chart listing major county issues organized by type, marking those they consider most important.
"It's a wish list of the things we'd like to see happen over the next five years," County Commissioner George Hanns said. The issues marked as most critical by the commission in the Sept. 19 meeting were similar to the ones selected at the last meeting about five years ago, he said.
In the Sept. 19 session, all five commission members marked fire and medical response times west of U.S. 1 and the county jail expansion as some of the county’s most significant strategic objectives.
The renovation of the county jail, a project budgeted for more than $12 million and still in the planning phase, is critical because the jail is so overcrowded the state has threatened to take it over if the county doesn't expand it, Hanns said.
Princess Place was selected by all five commissioners as a critical recreation and tourism issue. Commissioners are considering promotion of a “tourism corridor” for the area around Princess Place and the Florida Agricultural Museum, county spokesman Carl Laundrie said.
The discussion comes after Flagler County reached a tentative agreement with Palm Coast and the museum to deannex the museum and return it to the county.
Commissioner Hanns — who fought to bring the museum to Flagler County from Tallahassee, where it was originally built — said at a Sept. 4 Flagler County Commission meeting that he would like to see the museum become a major tourist attraction for the county.
Commissioners also marked the development of the county fairgrounds as a high priority. Hanns would like to add bathrooms and air conditioning for the fairground's buildings, and add a paved entrance road.
"We need to market and promote our fairgrounds for future events," Hanns said. "We want to compete. We want to make Flagler County more of a destination."
