The Planning and Zoning Agency is asked on Thursday to approve a land use exchange at the Shoppes at Mill Creek Forest. It would convert 120,000 square feet of permitted professional office space into 41,500 square feet of commercial and retail space, and the agenda says the conversion is calculated on equivalent vehicle trips.

If it carries, the master development plan for that project tops out at 440,500 square feet of commercial and retail and 15,000 square feet of professional office. Both ceilings are printed in the item rather than derived from anything. Neither is an estimate. The 440,500 is the figure worth writing down, because a cap is the thing a county can be held to years later, and once an exchange like this is approved the office square footage it gave up is no longer in the ordinance at all.

Subtracting the 41,500 being added leaves roughly 399,000 square feet of commercial and retail already entitled on that site, which is this paper’s arithmetic on two numbers the agenda prints.

A land use exchange on equivalent trips is the claim that 41,500 square feet of shops will put no more cars on the road at the busiest hour than 120,000 square feet of offices would have. That claim is entirely a number: how many trips per thousand square feet each use is assumed to generate, at what hour, on what day of the week, out of which edition of which manual. None of those figures appears anywhere in the two pages the county posted. A reader who wants to test the trade before Thursday has nothing to test it against, and the trip counts are the only thing holding the exchange up.

The file the county posted is named 10.01.26-PZA-Agenda-with-Staff-Packets.pdf and there are no staff packets in it. It is two pages of item descriptions, with no staff report, no staff recommendation and no traffic analysis attached to any of the seven. The agenda has no page of its own anywhere on the county site, and the only route to it is the calendar entry for Oct. 1.

Roughly three square feet of office are coming out for every one square foot of retail going in, which is again the paper’s arithmetic and not a ratio the county published. Item 6 is MAJMOD 2026-13, a major modification to the Shoppes at Mill Creek Forest PUD, and a PUD is a planned unit development, which lets a landowner swap the standard zoning rules for a custom set written into an ordinance. The ordinance here is 2018-45, as amended, it is a District 1 item, and the agenda lists Kimley-Horn and Associates as the presenter.

The other six

Item 5, MAJMOD 2025-12, District 5, is a major modification to the Last Mile Distribution Facility PUD, Ordinance 2020-43 as amended, at 3960 Inman Road. The request would allow up to 250,000 square feet of light industrial and flex warehousing, rename the PUD to FL St. Augustine Inman, clarify permitted uses and restate building setbacks. It would also reduce maximum building heights, add a right-of-way, increase access points and update phasing. Reducing a height ceiling and adding access points inside the same application is worth reading twice, because one of those is a limit coming down and the other is traffic being let in and out of the site in more places than it is allowed now. The agenda does not say how many more, and the presenter is the law firm Driver, McAfee, Hawthorne and Diebenow.

Item 7, REZ 2026-08, District 5, is a request to rezone approximately 9.16 acres from Open Rural to Commercial General, on the north side of County Road 210 West with direct access from Saint Johns Commons Road. Open Rural and Commercial General are the county’s own zoning district names, and the distance between them is the whole of the request. The agenda gives the acreage as approximate, does not say what is proposed to go on the land, and lists Beth Breeding LLC as the presenter.

Item 2, SUPMAJ 2026-10, District 5, is a special use permit for a project called Ancient City Farmstead, at 395 Saint Marks Pond Boulevard, in Open Rural zoning. It asks for four things at once under the Land Development Code: a special event venue under section 2.03.01.A, alcohol under 2.03.02, an unpaved parking lot under 2.03.15 and a large place of assembly under 2.03.55. Kimley-Horn is the presenter here as well, which makes two of the seven items on the agenda.

Item 1, SUPMIN 2026-07, District 3, is a special use permit under code section 2.03.08. It would allow a manufactured or mobile home on a single-family residential lot on Kinlaw Road, where the zoning is RS-3. The agenda lists the applicant as presenter.

Item 3, ZVAR 2026-26, District 1, is a zoning variance on Bishop Estates Road, where the zoning is RS-1. One variance, three code provisions. It asks to put a detached garage in a required front yard, to allow a front yard setback of 10 feet where Table 6.01 of the code requires 30, and to put mechanical equipment in a required front yard as well.

Item 4, MINMOD 2026-07, District 2, is a minor modification to the Stonehurst Plantation PUD, Ordinance 2001-04. It would allow overall lot coverage of 53 percent on one lot on Ferncreek Drive, where the maximum is 40, for a swimming pool and a deck. Thirteen percentage points over the cap.

Where and when

The meeting starts at half past one on the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 1, in the County Auditorium at the St. Johns County Administrative Complex, 500 San Sebastian View. The agenda’s own footer says the agency meets on the first and third Thursdays of each month, at that time and in that room, and it says applicants who fail to appear may have their applications delayed or denied.

The minutes going up for the agency’s approval are from the Sept. 3 meeting, which means the minutes of the Sept. 17 meeting are not on this agenda. Public comment is taken at the top, before any of the seven items is read.