BY DAN HILDEBRAN
City Planner Janice Fleet led Keystone Heights City Council members and its Planning and Zoning Board through an initial meeting to modernize the city’s comprehensive plan, which was last updated in 2011.
A comprehensive plan is a blueprint for growth. It outlines how the city will regulate future land use, traffic, housing, community facilities, conservation, recreation and open spaces, intergovernmental coordination, capital improvements, public school facilities and property rights.
Fleet recommended that the city aim to submit its comprehensive plan proposed changes to the state in April, after several more planning and zoning board meetings and approval by the city council.
During the October 15 workshop, participants focused on annexation rules, land use for the downtown core along South Lawrence Boulevard, the city’s current density ceiling of six housing units per acre, and land use regulations for the airport, which lies outside the Keystone Heights city limits and straddles Clay and Bradford Counties.
Fleet emphasized that the city should not try to rewrite its entire plan.
“We just want to tweak it to get where we need to go,” she said.
The planner then went over her annotated copy of the city’s current 67-page comprehensive plan. In the document, she highlighted sections that she deemed overlapping, outdated, or better suited for land development regulations than the comprehensive plan, as well as items that might conflict with Senate Bill 180.
Senate Bill 180
Fleet told the group that the city’s plan changes would be limited by Senate Bill 180, which went into effect on July 1.
The new law prohibits local governments from enacting land use and zoning regulations that are more restrictive or burdensome than those in place before recent hurricanes. The new law also extends the prohibition for a year after any subsequent hurricane that comes within 100 miles of a local government. Critics of the law say that it creates a rolling paralysis of land use planning for virtually the entire state.
Fleet said the new law and subsequent legal challenges have injected uncertainty in land use plans around the state, with comprehensive plan amendments in several jurisdictions rejected by the state because they violated the new law.
Bring back 1980
Planning and Zoning Board Chair, Dr. John Zieser, said that in talking to Keystone Heights residents, he detected a strong nostalgic desire.
“What is by and large the overwhelming majority of what the folks we have here, is that the idyllic age of Keystone Heights was 1980,” he said. “They would like us to remain rural. They would like us to remain, for a certain segment, isolationist, and to even go so much further as saying we don’t want anyone else new.”
Homelessness encampment
At the conclusion of the session, developer Joe Wiggins informed the participants that he had authorized the sheriff’s office to trespass people who had erected an encampment in the woods behind Johnny’s Barbecue on land that he owns.
“They should be doing that in the next few days,” Wiggins said, “and then late next week or the following week, we’re going to go in there and remove all those structures.”
Planning and Zoning Board member Carrie Mullins added that homeless people living in a wooded area around Jones-Gallagher Funeral Home and Bryan’s Ace Hardware have been stealing from a nearby church and leaving trash in the area.
