Commission asked Tuesday to swap 745 apartments for 330 houses

The Board of County Commissioners is asked Tuesday to take 745 apartments out of Durbin Park and put 330 single-family houses in their place, and the agenda says the swap comes “with no increase in the project’s external traffic.”

That sentence is not a prediction about how the roads will feel. It is the output of a table, and the table is in the packet.

The instrument is a land use exchange, which is a standing feature of a development agreement rather than a fresh approval. The agreement fixes a ceiling on evening rush-hour trips, assigns every permitted land use a trip rate, and then lets a developer move entitlements between uses so long as the trip arithmetic comes out even. What changes is what gets built. What does not change is the traffic number the county agreed to.

Revised Exhibit 3 to the proposed third amendment prices every use the agreement permits. A multi-family unit is worth 0.354 net external PM peak-hour trips and a single-family unit is worth 0.799. Office is priced at 1.262 per thousand square feet, commercial at 2.547, and a hotel room at 0.379. The exhibit then does the trade in front of the reader, in a box headed Example:

That is the whole mechanism, and it is not hidden anywhere. Two hundred sixty-four evening trips leave the multi-family column, 264 arrive in the single-family column, and by the terms of the agreement the project’s external traffic is unchanged. The unit count is not the ceiling in this agreement. The trip count is the ceiling, and it is the only thing the exchange has to hold.

Where 0.799 came from, which is not in the packet

The exchange table is public and has been since the packet posted. The work behind one of its rates was not, so the Tattler asked the county for it and the county sent it the next day.

The memo is by Chindalur Traffic Solutions and runs fifteen pages. It states that the single-family rate was estimated from the Institute of Transportation Engineers Trip Generation Manual, 12th Edition, and that to reach one representative number the consultant took “the average of the minimum and maximum development scenarios (300 and 450 dwelling units, respectively).”

It then reduced the rate for internal capture, which is the share of trips that never reach a public road because the houses and the shops beside them serve each other. The memo says that reduction “was limited to a maximum of 20 percent of the trips generated by the land use with the lower trip generation to ensure a conservative estimate of net external trips.” The number that falls out of that is the 0.799 printed on the exhibit.

The development agreement itself, in language this amendment leaves in place, says its land use codes refer to the Trip Generation Manual, 9th Edition, published in 2012. The rate the board is being asked to adopt is built on the 12th.

The memo also runs a before and after for the parcels east of Interstate 95, where the houses would go. Those parcels were previously programmed for 277 multi-family units and a block of office park. The memo puts the previously approved figure at 1,626 gross PM peak-hour trips and 1,606 net external, and the proposed one at 1,217 gross and 805 net external, “representing an approximately 49.9% reduction in external PM peak-hour trips.”

Two figures in the memo do not match themselves. Its narrative describes the previously programmed office park as 1,650,040 square feet, while the calculation sheet that produces the 1,626-trip total enters 1,165,040 square feet of office. Its narrative describes a 250,000-square-foot commercial component, while the same sheet enters 235,000 square feet of retail. The totals the memo reports are the ones its sheets produce, which is to say the smaller office figure is the one the arithmetic used. On the two figures that disagree, the prose is the outlier and the spreadsheet is the record.

What the rest of the item does

The Durbin Creek National Urban Service Area is 1,624 acres, and the staff report says approximately 1,254 of them are designated Intensive Commercial on the county’s future land use map. The area is approved today for 2,265 apartment units, 350 hotel rooms, 2,276,065 square feet of office park, 2,397,130 square feet of retail and 375,000 square feet of hospital space, in four phases.

The agreement was approved in 2015 and amended in 2016 and again in 2020, and this is the third amendment to it. The amendment in front of the board on Tuesday does three separate things.

• It converts the units, dropping the apartment ceiling from 2,265 to 1,520 and adding 330 single-family units in Phase 2B.
• It finalizes the roadway improvement costs at a total of $56,103,162, which the amendment describes as the actual costs of improvements already completed.
• It leaves the rest of the entitlement alone. The staff report says there is “no change to the remainder of the approved development entitlements.”

On the roads, the report records that the Phase 1, 2A, 2B and 3 mitigation requirements are complete. SR 9B and West Peyton Parkway have been open to traffic since 2018. East Peyton Parkway is six lanes and has been open since 2024. Phase 4 is partially complete: Race Track Road is four-laned from Bartram Park Boulevard to East Peyton Parkway, and the remainder, including the I-95 overpass, has been funded by the Florida Department of Transportation and will be built alongside the I-95 widening, “currently scheduled for completion by 2030.”

Transportation Development staff “has reviewed the request and does not object to the proposed modification,” the report states, on the grounds that it “does not increase the overall project trip generation originally approved and all required roadway improvements have been constructed or are funded for construction.” Under the heading Correspondence the same report reads: “No correspondence has been received regarding this request at the time of the writing of this staff report.”

The table runs the other way too

An exchange table is not a one-way instrument, and Exhibit 3 prints every direction it runs in. Reading from the Convert From column on the left to the Convert To headings across the top, one single-family unit is worth 2.26 multi-family units. One thousand square feet of commercial is worth 7.19 multi-family units, or 3.19 single-family. One thousand square feet of office is worth 3.56 apartments.

Those are the rates any future exchange inside this agreement would be run on, and running one takes no further hearing. The number that binds is the trip total rather than the unit count.

Two hearings, and Tuesday is the first

Tuesday’s hearing is a first reading, because state law requires two public hearings to modify a development agreement, and the staff report ends by directing the board to announce the second. That one is set for Oct. 6.

The zoning side moves first. The Planning and Zoning Agency takes up the companion item, MAJMOD 2026-09 Durbin Park, at 1:30 p.m. Thursday in the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View. That request adds the 330 single-family units as an allowed use inside Mixed-Use Parcel E, the East Parcel on the eastern side of I-95, modifies residential setbacks within that parcel, and reduces the multi-family maximum from 2,265 to 1,520. The commission then hears the PUD modification concurrently with the second development agreement hearing on Oct. 6. The board itself meets Tuesday at 9 a.m. in the same auditorium, and public comment is taken at the start.