An application to convert 120,000 square feet of approved professional office space into 41,500 square feet of commercial and retail space, and a separate request to rezone 9.16 acres for commercial use, will both be presented to the public on Monday night, Sept. 14, thirty minutes apart, at two different buildings in the northwest corner of the county.

Neither is a hearing. Both are noticed as Northwest Sector community planning public participation meetings, run by the applicant rather than the county, which means nobody votes and nobody has to answer you. Show up anyway. This is the stage where a site plan is still soft.

The exchange rate

The first notice concerns MAJMOD 2026-13, a major modification to the Shoppes at Mill Creek Forest planned unit development. A PUD is a custom set of zoning rules a developer negotiates in place of the standard ones; this one was adopted as Ordinance 2018-45 and has been amended since. The parcel is listed at 0 Greenbriar Road, south of Greenbriar Road, at the south corners of Greenbriar Road and Longleaf Pine Parkway.

What the applicant is asking for, in the notice’s own words, is “a land use exchange converting 120,000 square feet of permitted professional office space to 41,500 square feet of commercial/retail space based on equivalent vehicle trips, resulting in a maximum of 440,500 square feet of commercial/retail space and 15,000 square feet of professional office space.”

Run the arithmetic backward from those two totals and you get the before-and-after:

Now approved If modified
Commercial / retail 399,000 sq ft 440,500 sq ft
Professional office 135,000 sq ft 15,000 sq ft

That is the Tattler’s subtraction, not the county’s, from the figures the notice prints.

The phrase to sit with is “based on equivalent vehicle trips.” The county is not trading square feet for square feet. It is trading trips for trips, and because a retail building generates far more car trips per thousand square feet than an office building does, 120,000 square feet of one buys only 41,500 square feet of the other. The implied rate is roughly 2.9 square feet of office surrendered for every one square foot of retail gained.

The notice adds: “This modification does not result in an increase of currently approved uses.”

The concurrency question

Here is the one I always ask: what does this do to the intersections, and who paid for the study that says so?

The notice does not answer it. It does not name the trip generation rates used, the source of those rates, the daily or peak-hour trip totals on either side of the exchange, or the current level of service on Longleaf Pine Parkway or on County Road 210. It gives an application number and a phone number, and an address to show up at.

The trip calculation is the entire basis of the request. If the trips are genuinely equivalent, the exchange holds up on its own terms. If they are not, the difference lands on the same two intersections either way. The document that settles it is the traffic analysis in the application file, which is what to ask for on Monday and what the Tattler will pull from the development tracker before this reaches the Planning and Zoning Agency.

The second one

The other notice concerns REZ 2026-08, St. Johns Commons Commercial: “Rezoning from OR to Commercial General for 9.16 acres with approximately 50% open space.” The notice uses the abbreviation OR without expanding it and does not identify the parcel by address.

Nine acres is small, and the notice is thin: no address, no square footage, no site plan, no traffic figure. What it does give you is the application number and the open-space commitment, and the 50 percent open space figure is the number to hold the eventual site plan against. A rezoning is the step that decides what may be built there at all; the site plan only decides how it is arranged.

Where to be, and when

Monday, Sept. 14, 6 p.m. MAJMOD 2026-13, Shoppes at Mill Creek Forest. Bartram Trail High School, 7399 Longleaf Pine Parkway, St. Johns.

Monday, Sept. 14, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. REZ 2026-08, St. Johns Commons Commercial. Faith Community Church, 3450 CR 210 West, St. Johns.

Both notices list a contact name and phone number on the county calendar entry, and both applications are visible in the county’s development tracker by application number: MAJMOD_2026000013 and REZ_2026000008.

The Planning and Zoning Agency meets Thursday, Sept. 17, at 1:30 p.m. in the County Auditorium, 500 San Sebastian View. Neither of these items appears on a posted agenda yet. When one does, this column will have the traffic numbers the notice skipped.