BY DAN HILDEBRAN
[email protected]
The Keystone Heights City Council passed the first reading of a rezoning that would replace a planned urban development named Country Meadows, with a similar PUD named Sunrise Estates.
The city’s planning and zoning board recommended the replacement of the 14-acre proposed development in the Paradise Lake area in June.
In 2022, developer Jed Duckro proposed a 55-lot housing development on the parcel bordering Paradise Point Drive and Sunrise Boulevard.
Duckro sold the 14-acre parcel to Clay County contractor Joe Wiggins the following year.
Wiggins also owns 48+ acres north of Commercial Circle and Fox Run. He previously told the council he wanted to develop the acreage behind American Legion Post 202 on State Road 21 into a mixed-use property.
The change in zoning from one PUD to another centers around Wiggins’s plan to convert eight of the development’s single-family lots into 16 multi-family lots, on which he hopes to build townhouses.
Wiggins told council members during their August 4 meeting that if the townhouses sell well, he will incorporate multi-unit housing into his plan to develop the 48 acres or more off Fox Run.
Council member Dave Welch expressed concern about the increased traffic on Sunrise Boulevard between Nightingale Street and State Road 100, citing the proposed addition of 180 to 200 residents in Sunrise Estates.
City planner Janis Fleet responded that motorists entering and exiting the neighborhood could also take Nightingale Street east to Orchid Avenue as an alternate route, likely reducing the load on the State Road 100 intersection, which faces a McDonald’s and an Advance Auto Parts store.
Both Mayor Nina Rodenroth and Council Member Dan Lewandowski supported Wiggins’s concept of increasing housing diversity with more multi-family options.
“For more than a decade, we have expected housing to be built on that piece of property,” Lewandowski told Wiggins, “and so personally I think it’s great that you’re doing it and creating the townhomes gives us a little more variety in price points, and so therefore it does open it up to socioeconomic diversity.”
“I’m a hundred percent for it,” added the mayor. “We need it. We need versatility for our citizens. We have a lot of young 20-year-olds who can’t afford a house, and we’d like to keep them here. We don’t want them to leave us.”
