- November 5, 2024
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Proposed multifamily residential buildings that — if they're built — would become the city's tallest are just too tall, Palm Coast Mayor Milissa Holland said at a City Council workshop Nov. 14.
"I drove up to Marineland just to view a comparison of what these could look like — a monstrosity in our very beautiful, scenic community that doesn't allow anything close to this."
MILISSA HOLLAND, Palm Coast mayor
The 95-foot buildings would be part of the planned Marina del Palma development, to be built on land that is being annexed into the city at Colbert Lane and Harbor View Drive, near the Sea Ray plant. They would include seven stories over a parking garage.
Some of the details of the development were approved by the county government in 2004 when the land fell under the county’s jurisdiction, and the city can’t add certain restrictions — including height restrictions — after the fact.
Its options limited, the Palm Coast’s City Council voted unanimously at an Oct. 17 council meeting to approve the zoning and land use changes that will allow a developer to build the units. The project will have to be approved in a second vote before the approval is final.
But Holland wondered if the city might be able to find a way to mitigate the buildings’ impact or prevent similar problems in the future.
“I want to understand what the process is. I know because they got approval rights through Flagler County first in 2004, so it was a long time ago,” she said. “I drove up to Marineland just to view a comparison of what these could look like — a monstrosity in our very beautiful, scenic community that doesn’t allow anything close to this. What remedies do we have to state to this developer, ‘Would you please consider taking it down, even two stories?’” She offered to bring pictures to a future meeting to show how tall the buildings would be. “It’s bad. It’s obnoxiously bad,” she said. “It’ll change the whole dynamic of our community. And I just don’t know what kind of recourse we have.”
City Manger Jim Landon said the city could communicate with the county to avoid such issues in the future. “If we can have an understanding with Flagler County not to approve them to begin with, that would be, obviously, the best solution — and particularly those areas that they know are going to be annexed, and they have different criteria than we do. ... We can do that at the staff level. We might want to think about how that would happen on a governing body level — County Commission to City Council — because ultimately, it’s the County Commission’s decision to approve those.”
