An application filed against roughly 20 acres south of the State Road 16 and State Road 13 North interchange asks St. Johns County for three things at once, and the first of them decides the other two. It asks that the land stop being residential on the Future Land Use Map.

The mechanism is a small scale comprehensive plan amendment, CPA(SS) 2026-05, moving the site from Residential-A to Rural Commercial. Riding on it are SUPMAJ 2026-08, a special use permit for a fish camp and for the sale and on-site consumption of alcohol, and a variance numbered ZVAR 2026-TBD, which would allow transient docks for non-residential uses in the St. Johns River-South zoning district. The county calendar carries all three under the project name Little Florence Cove Fish Camp, and the GIS link on that entry gives the full application number as CPA(SS)_2026000005.

The community meeting is Thursday, Oct. 1, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Trout Creek Academy multi-purpose room, 855 Timberwolf Trail. It is run by the applicant’s consultant, Christina Evans of Gulfstream Design Group, whose number is printed on the notice.

The land use change is what carries the fish camp

Read the county’s own plan and the sequence explains itself. Policy A.1.13.1(g) of the Land Use element defines Rural Commercial as “commercial uses intended to serve rural communities and which are compatible with rural land use densities and intensities,” and then lists what that permits. The list runs: general stores, retail sale of motor fuels, bait and tackle and general supplies, roadside stands, nurseries, and “fish camps with accessory lodging and restaurant facilities.” Bed and breakfast establishments, campgrounds, recreational vehicle parks, hunt clubs, saddle clubs, riding academies, boarding stables and shooting ranges follow in the same sentence.

So the category the applicant is asking for is the category whose published definition already names the use they want to build. That is not a loophole. It is how the plan is written. The land use amendment is therefore the load-bearing request, and the special use permit is the paperwork that follows it.

The county posts two Land Use elements on the same page, one headed 2025 and one headed 2050. Their Rural Commercial definitions are identical, word for word, fish camps included. Whichever of the two a hearing is argued under, that sentence does not move.

What the site can do now

Residential-A is Density Zone “A” on the Future Land Use Map. The 2050 element’s Mainland Area table on page 39 gives Density Zone A a base density of 1.0 unit per net acre, with a maximum of 2.0 once Optional Density Factors are applied. The 2025 element’s table on page 35 gives the same base of 1.0 and a maximum of 1.0.

Net acreage in both documents means the total site less wetlands under the jurisdiction of the St. Johns River Water Management District or the Department of Environmental Protection, and less anything designated Conservation. On 20 acres at a river interchange that subtraction is not a detail. Nobody has published what it comes to here, so the number of houses this land could hold today is not a number anybody can print.

The docks are the third request and they are the quiet one

The variance asks to allow transient docks for non-residential uses within St. Johns River-South. Transient means tie up and leave rather than moor and stay, which is the difference between a dock that serves a house and a dock that serves a business. A fish camp with a bar, reachable by boat, on the St. Johns, is a different arrival problem from a fish camp you drive to, and the requests that would create it are travelling as three separate applications.

The concurrency questions do not have answers yet, and there is a reason. A northwest sector community participation meeting happens before the county writes anything down. There is no staff report, no staff recommendation and no trip generation count in this record, because the county does not produce one at this stage. What exists is the applicant’s notice, and the applicant wrote it.

And nine days before it, a church

The same calendar carries a second northwest sector meeting, on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 6 p.m. at Mill Creek Academy, 3750 International Golf Parkway. It is CPA(SS) 26-08 and REZ 26-16, filed under the name Fruit Cove Baptist Church of Jacksonville, and the GIS links give the numbers as CPA(SS)_2026000008 and REZ_2026000016. The notice names Casey Dendor of ETM Inc. as the contact and invites questions by email or phone.

That notice does not say what the amendment would change the designation to, and it does not give an acreage. A land use amendment and a rezoning moving together is the same pairing as the fish camp: the map first, the zoning district second.

Both notices went up on the county calendar this week. Neither application has been in front of a board.