4,462 acres, one meeting, and a Sept. 29 deadline the county put in writing

St. Johns County has put a date on the 4,462-acre question in front of its commission. The 90-day certification period on the N Palm Valley Road agricultural enclave application ends Sept. 29, and the board has one scheduled meeting before that date.

Growth Management Director Mike Roberson answered a written request Friday, routed to him by the county’s Office of Public Affairs. He gave the receipt date for ENCERT 2026-01 as July 1, 2026, and stated the expiry in a single sentence:

“The 90-day certification period will end September 29, 2026.”

Roberson supplied receipt dates for the other two enclave applications on Tuesday’s agenda as well. Sandy Creek, at 379 acres, came in Aug. 5, and the 310-acre AFI Property application came in Aug. 7. The written compliance reports the statute requires went to the three applicants on July 31, Sept. 4 and Sept. 6, each of them thirty days after the application it answers.

Sept. 29 falls eighteen days from Friday. The county’s meeting calendar prints the rule that commission meetings are held on the first and third Tuesdays of each month, which leaves Tuesday’s 9 a.m. session and then nothing scheduled until Oct. 6. The same page carries a standing note that the board “reserves the right to cancel and or change the meeting schedule as needed,” so a special meeting remains available to it.

What happens at the end of the 90 days is not discretionary. Section 163.3162(4)© provides that a local government which does not approve or deny a certification within 90 days after receipt must certify the parcels as an agricultural enclave. What a certification then does to the county’s own land use map is set out in the version of the law the Legislature rewrote this year.

At the Sept. 1 hearing the board tried both directions and landed on neither. A motion to deny failed, a motion to approve then failed, and “no further action was taken on the application,” according to the staff report. On Sept. 3, during commissioner comments after the budget hearing, the report says it was requested that the item be placed on Tuesday’s agenda for further consideration.

Staff’s written conclusion is that the application “appears to satisfy the statutory definition of an agricultural enclave” in s. 163.3164(4) and the certification requirements of s. 163.3162(4)(a). The first suggested motion on Tuesday’s item is a motion to approve, and a second suggested motion, to deny, follows it. The deny motion directs the county attorney to prepare a written order with findings of fact and conclusions of law. The Agricultural Enclave Certification Report attached to the item is dated July 31, 2026, five weeks before the staff report that carries it.

Two tests at 75 percent, and they are not the same test

The definition test comes first, at s. 163.3164(4)©1.b. That is the provision the applicant relies on, and it qualifies a parcel surrounded on at least 75 percent of its perimeter by:

“A parcel or parcels that the local government has designated, in the local government’s zoning map and future land use map, as land that is to be developed for industrial, commercial, or residential purposes, and at least 50 percent of such parcel or parcels is existing industrial, commercial, or residential development.”

Note the breadth. Any of the three uses counts toward the 75 percent, and the 50 percent is a second and narrower measurement folded inside the first.

The size test is paragraph (e), which decides how many acres an enclave may hold, and it caps one at 1,280 acres before adding this:

“however, if the parcel or parcels are surrounded on at least 75 percent of their perimeter by existing or authorized residential development that will result in a density at buildout of at least 1,000 residents per square mile, the area must be determined to be urban and the parcel or parcels may not exceed 4,480 acres, unless such parcel or parcels exceeding 1,280 acres are within the affected counties covered by the water protection plan specified in s. 373.4595(4)©”

Note the narrowing. Paragraph (e) asks for residential development specifically rather than any of three uses, and it attaches a buildout density condition to that development. At approximately 4,462 acres this application clears 1,280 by a wide margin, so (e) is the provision it has to satisfy, and it sits about 18 acres under the higher ceiling.

The report’s adjacent development comparison sets out what surrounds the property, side by side. It gives each side its future land use designation, its zoning, its maximum permitted density and whether development exists there now, and the segment lengths the objection draws from the applicant’s Exhibit 6 table fill in how much boundary each side accounts for.

The applicant’s own exhibits count the east, south and west sides toward the designation test, and the objection reads those exhibits as totaling 49,101.27 feet, or 84.41 percent of the perimeter, against the 84.53 percent staff reports. The four segments add to the 58,166.76-foot total the record uses. The west side is the largest of the three counted sides at 19,505.73 feet, which is about a third of the boundary, and the report’s table records no existing development on it.

In the county’s certification report, one figure answers both of those tests.

Under the definition test, the report says county GIS staff evaluated the application and the available GIS data, and confirmed that the subject property:

“is surrounded on 84.53% of its perimeter by parcels designated on the Future Land Use Map as land to be developed for industrial, commercial, or residential purposes [New Town, Res-A, Commercial, and Multi-Use (COJ)] and by parcels designated on the Zoning Map as land to be developed for industrial, commercial, or residential purposes (PUD, RS-2, & RS-3).”

The same paragraph reports separately that the property is surrounded by “50.72% of its perimeter by parcels developed as existing industrial, commercial, or residential (Eastern and Southern),” which is the inner half of the definition test. Under the size test, the report gives the larger figure again:

“Additionally, the property is surrounded by authorized residential development along 84.53% of its perimeter, consistent with the requirements of Section 163.3164(4)(e).”

The 84.53 percent under paragraph © is described as parcels designated for industrial, commercial or residential purposes, and the designations listed there include Commercial and Multi-Use. The same 84.53 percent under paragraph (e) is described as authorized residential development. The staff review under (e) does not restate a buildout density figure. The applicant’s response printed directly above it says Exhibit 10 shows that 84 percent of the existing and authorized residential development east, south and west of the site “will achieve a buildout density of at least 1,000 residents per square mile.”

The written objections in the packet make that distinction their central argument. The applicant’s Exhibit 10 assigns the east segment to Residential-A at 1,760 residents per square mile, the south to New Town at 1,811 and the west to Jacksonville Multi-Use at 1,523, totaling 49,101.27 feet, or 84 percent, the objection states. It reads the staff report as adopting 84.53 percent for the exception, “the identical figure it uses for the FLUM-designation test at page 6 of its report,” and it argues that the figure “counts frontage that is not residential,” pointing at the report’s own adjacency table, which lists the east side as Residential-A and Commercial. Satisfaction of the 50 percent test in paragraph © “does not automatically establish paragraph (e),” it states, and it asks the board to make the express urban determination the paragraph calls for, because the application needs that cap to stand.

Roughly a quarter of the perimeter is measured across open water

The statute directs that measurement. Its closing sentence says that where a right-of-way, body of water or canal runs along a parcel’s perimeter, the calculation must use “the adjacent parcel or parcels across the right-of-way, body of water, or canal,” which is what staff did here. The report says that “accordingly, the eastern perimeter of the subject property was evaluated using the parcels located across the ICW.”

The record puts the total perimeter at 58,166.76 feet, the eastern segment at 16,131.40 feet and the southern segment at 13,464.14 feet. Eastern segment over total perimeter: 27.7 percent. So a bit more than a quarter of the measured boundary is shoreline on the Intracoastal Waterway, and the development counted along that stretch stands on the far side of the water.

What the objection counts

Twenty-two pages of written objections from a county resident sit in the same packet. Their arithmetic lands on the other side of the 50 percent line in paragraph ©1.b, the inner measurement of the definition test.

The objection works from the applicant’s stated total perimeter of 58,166.76 feet. It gives the applicant the benefit of counting across homeowner-association green space and intervening rights of way, and it credits the full eastern frontage. On those assumptions the existing-development share comes to 46.42 percent, which the objection calls “about 2,082 feet short of the 50% threshold.” Run against current Property Appraiser geometry, its figure falls to about 45.43 percent. Remove roughly 1,258.6 feet of eastern frontage that the objection says aligns with nine opposite-shore parcels the Property Appraiser classifies as vacant, and its figure falls again, to about 44.26 percent.

Staff reports 50.72 percent. The objection reads the applicant’s own exhibits as totaling 29,595.54 qualifying feet, or 50.88 percent, presented in the application as “51%,” and it prints the statutory floor at 29,083.38 feet. Its summary of the distance between those readings is that “the margin above failure is roughly 419 feet (staff) to 512 feet (applicant) out of eleven miles of boundary.”

On the calendar the objection is explicit about what another continuance would do. If the board does not approve or deny within 90 days of the July 1 application, “on or about September 29, 2026,” then “the property is certified by operation of law,” it states. A denial, it adds, “requires issuance in writing with detailed findings of fact and conclusions of law,” a requirement the statute places on a denial and not on an approval. Under a table comparing the board’s options it puts the point in two sentences:

“A continuance is not a neutral option. On this record, delay is approval.”

The concurrency question, and the answer in the file

Staff reviewed the public services element and wrote that “review by County departments indicates that all public facilities are not presently available.” Paragraph (d) does not require them. It asks that the services be available, or scheduled in the capital improvement element, or providable by an alternative provider “in order to ensure consistency with applicable concurrency provisions of s. 163.3180,” and then it opens a fourth door. The criterion is also satisfied where an applicant offers to enter a binding agreement to pay for, construct or contribute land for its proportionate share of those improvements, and the report finds that the applicant has made that offer. The site sits inside JEA’s water, sewer and reclaimed water territory, and the applicant supplied a JEA letter stating there is capacity to serve it.

The density any proportionate share would be measured against is the open number. The report’s own comparison table lists the applicant’s proposed gross density at 1.0 unit per gross acre and a maximum of 4,462 dwelling units. It gives the highest density on an adjacent parcel or adjacent development as 6 units per acre, and then carries a row headed Maximum Potential Density whose entry reads “Maximum 26,772 units,” which is 4,462 multiplied by six. The objection notes that the JEA capacity letter addresses service at up to 1.0 unit per gross acre. It asks the board to determine, before voting, whether the 1.0-unit representation is “legally binding on the applicant and its successors,” and which figure a proportionate share would be calculated from: “the 4,462-unit proposal, or the up-to-26,772-unit entitlement?”

One more thing appears in the report, and it is a citation rather than a finding. Each of its six findings, one under every element of the definition, cites “Section 163.3146(4)” of the Florida Statutes. The agricultural enclave definition is at s. 163.3164(4), which is how the staff review text immediately above several of those findings cites it.

The three enclave items are numbers 2, 3 and 4 on Tuesday’s regular agenda in the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View, and public comment is taken at the start of the meeting. Sandy Creek and AFI Property came in on Aug. 5 and Aug. 7, which sets their ninety-day marks in early November. N Palm Valley’s expires on the 29th.