Palm Beach County officials say they only support part of a proposal to redevelop a swath of land near Florida’s Turnpike in West Delray: A panel favors revamping 10 acres to the south of Atlantic Avenue but opposes a larger component that calls for reshaping about 51 acres to the north of the corridor.
The Park West North parcel is about 51 acres at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Florida’s Turnpike, and a south parcel is nearly 10 acres directly south of Atlantic Avenue and east of Persimmon Avenue.
For Park West North, developers are pitching self-service storage, a fitness center, manufacturing and processing space with a taproom, and a warehouse with an accessory office. A nearly 14-acre preserve area also would be included on the north parcel. Meanwhile, Park West South would hold a warehouse with accessory office space.
Park West originally proposed more than 700 multifamily units, a 150-room hotel, hundreds of thousands of square feet of storage, commercial retail and office space, along with an “indoor adventure rec and workspace,” a neighborhood grocery, workforce housing, a main street, town center and a public preserve. But in response to criticisms about the proposal’s incompatibility for bringing too much to the area, JMorton Planning & Landscape Architecture, the developers representing the project, opted for a more scaled-back approach.
Still, the efforts to alter the Park West proposal were not enough to fully persuade Palm Beach County planning commissioners to recommend approval for both parts of the project. In one vote, the planning commissioners recommend approval by a 6-2 vote for Park West South. But they recommend denial, by another 6-2 vote, for the much larger Park West North.
“I’m sympathetic, very much sympathetic, to the residents that live in the area that want to see community serving-business development, but at the same time, this is the Ag Reserve,” planning commissioner Raphael Clemente said during a recent public meeting, specifically addressing Park West North, which he voted against. “If we’re going keep chipping away in this fashion at the Ag Reserve, we are going to undermine the reason it was created.”
The planning commissioners and nearby Ag Reserve residents did, however, express contentment — cautiously, at times — for the 10-acre Park West South proposal because its size and effect on traffic appeared far less significant than its north counterpart.
“This will be the best use for this land,” said Alliance of Delray Residential Associations president Lori Vinikoor during the meeting.
The background behind the land
Paul Okean built the plant nursery business, Morningstar Nursery Inc. on the site, which was acquired more than 40 years ago. According to Laura McClellan, who also is with JMorton Planning, Morningstar Nursery went on to become a major supplier for large retail stores including Kmart, Kroger and Albertson’s.
Then, through the eminent domain process, 20 acres of Okean’s land had to be given up for the turnpike in the early 2000s.
“It was a significant impact to our client to give up 20 acres of his land,” McClellan said during the planning commission meeting.
McClellan also told county planning commissioners that when Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida in 2005, Okean lost more than 15 acres of nursery and plant material.
“And then in 2007, we had the Great Recession, and the housing bubble burst. So it was a difficult time in the nursery business,” McClellan said. “And then in 2009, a lot of the small growers were leaving the industry and the industry was being consolidated into just a few large growers.”
The combination of Okean’s nursery business challenges and the area between U.S. 441 and Atlantic Avenue being “a long-standing industrial node in the Ag Reserve,” are reasons why the land change is being requested, McClellan said.
Because the land plots are near the Delray Lake Estates community along with existing commercial uses and even other preserve parcels, county staff considered Park West “generally consistent with the development pattern of the corridor,” according to county documents.
Jennifer Morton, president of JMorton Planning, said during the recent planning commission meeting that the Ag Reserve was always intended to have a “mix of uses,” including commercial and residential developments.
But some Ag Reserve residents and planning commissioners did not necessarily agree, especially when it came to the Park West North proposal.
Joseph O’Donnell, who, along with his wife, owns Irish Acres, a horse farm on Starkey Road directly northwest of the Park West North proposal, has been adamantly opposed to the project since its inception.
“It’ll be a disaster,” O’Donnell said during the planning commission meeting. “This development is right across the road from Irish Acres. It cuts us off from one of the main roads on our farm, literally cuts us off.”
‘A freaking nightmare’
Beyond worrying about stripping away the Ag Reserve of its preserve land, some of the planning commissioners worried about how the proposal, particularly Park West North, could exacerbate traffic, which already is an issue along Atlantic Avenue.
“How the hell is Atlantic Avenue going to handle any more traffic? I live on that road. … I’m up and down Atlantic all day long, and it is a freaking nightmare,” planning commissioner Rick Stopek said. “I just don’t understand how this roadway can handle any more burden in its current form.”
Park West North is an example of a conundrum that county officials often face, Stopek said.
“It may be it’s a great plan and it has merit, but in its present form, the roadways can’t handle the volume of traffic,” he said. “My hesitation is that I think we just have to put a hard stop on projects before the infrastructure is in place.”
The Park West North and South proposals will next go before county commissioners, who will vote on whether or not to approve it.