Raydient issues press release to "Set the Record Straight"

Editor's Note:  With yesterday's post of the call to action from officials in Nassau County, we wrote in our editor's comment, " Before we cover a story, we want to know the story."  We still have work to do to begin to separate the wheat from the chaff,  but after receiving a press release  from Raydient giving us a glimpse of their position on the controversy between the Board of County Commissioners and Raydient, we decided to share  this information with our readers.  

Raydient

Press Release

February 22, 2018 10:42 a.m.

A lot has been said about us recently by Nassau County staff and officials, and unfortunately a lot of it is untrue. We wanted to set the record straight with the facts below. I am also attaching a copy of the much-talked-about Senate Bill 324* in case you haven’t yet seen it. We welcome the opportunity to discuss any of this further with you.

[To view bill click here and then click on (highlighted in blue,) CS-SB/324 Substitute, click on "841860 - Proposed Committee Substitute Approximations, Web Page PDF]

• According to Nassau County’s policies, developers are required to contribute land for public community and regional parks and builders are required to pay recreational impact fees for park facilities to accommodate for the people that purchase in their communities.
• The ENCPA includes plans to allocate land for parks and recreation. At build out, we will have contributed 556 acres for public regional parks and 186 acres for community parks. Roughly 50% of the 24,000-acre ENCPA, including about 3,850 upland acres, will be set aside in a Conservation Habitat Network. The 3,850 acres alone is five times what the county’s policies require in their Comprehensive Plan.
• Future residents of the ENCPA will be County taxpayers as well. It was never envisioned that the County could wash their hands of the responsibility to provide county services to these taxpayers.
• Today there are zero residents in Wildlight and the ENCPA, so we are not putting any pressure on the county’s current parks and recreation needs.
• Since 2016, we have been offering to the county to pay for a Civic Facilities Study, which includes parks and recreation, to determine what needs will be generated by the development of the ENCPA.
• We believe the county is threatening to place an inequitable burden on our company by shifting the costs associated with growth outside the ENCPA onto Raydient and residents inside the ENCPA. We need to protect our company’s interests and expect to be treated fairly. We expect Nassau County’s policies to be enforced in the same way to all developers and landowners. 

A lot of the press coverage has included a number of quotes from the BOCC’s Feb. 12 meeting.  [Click here for meeting video.] Here are a few quotes from that meeting that stood out to us, along with the timestamp of when they were said in the meeting:

“No one's addressing the recreation. We aren't. We're not addressing the traffic. We don't fund anything. We're at a bare minimum, and when you hear what we have in the CIP funds, there is none.” – Pat Edwards, 58:28 

“...everybody understood the major recreation, public and otherwise, was destined to go inside the ENCPA. [The County doesn’t] have any -- you have one 10-acre parcel down 107, but there are no other big parcels to handle the number of parks that are necessary as you move forward.” – Mike Mullin, 26:00

“I don't even know what the total recreational pieces are, and I definitely don't know what that cost. So without having that complete picture, I can't assist them into coming up with something that works for both sides of the partnership.” – Shanea Jones, 46:45