At its Wednesday meeting, the Tallahassee City Commission approved the development agreement for the 894-acre property known as the Welaunee Heel. That was the second and final public hearing on the deal.
The property is located north of U.S. 90 and east of Interstate-10. The proposed development contains residential, office, industrial park and retail commercial uses.
It also includes a four-lane connecting road through the area. Speakers against approving the agreement included neighbors and cyclists.
Commissioner Jeremy Matlow argued that regular users of the nearby Miccosukee Greenway hadn’t been part of the discussion, but City Manager Reese Goad said the Welaunee Heel Planned Unit Development, or PUD, was already a done deal.
“In the PUD that the commission authorized, it allows for this crossing," Goad said. "The development agreement is simply that the developer pays for the road as opposed to the city. So, the PUD gives the property right to which pre-existed the Greenway. That decision’s been made. The approval or non-approval of the development agreement would not change that.”
Matlow says the connecting road would add traffic to the existing canopy and further fragment the canopy road. He also says it’s a failure on the city’s part that regular users of the neighboring Miccosukee Greenway hadn’t known what was happening…
“…to where we’re at a development agreement that people are just finding out about it. That should be a red flag to everybody. We created a huge mistake that people who actively use this – the cyclist community have reached out to us, all kinds of active users have reached out to us today. So, we failed somewhere along the line already. And how can we rectify this situation and how can we fix it…”
But Mayor John Dailey called for a vote and the agreement passed 3-2, with Mayor Pro Tem Dianne Williams-Cox and Commissioner Curtis Richardson joining Dailey in the majority.
