Deltona will shrink its utility-service boundary — county wants city to give up even more

GRAPHIC COURTESY CITY OF DELTONA
Boundary shrinks — The City of Deltona is preparing to reduce its utility-service area. The large green area shows the service area Deltona first adopted in 2005. The heavy black boundary shows the newly smaller area proposed by city officials. State law allows cities to claim utility-service areas whose boundaries extend as far as five miles from their city limits. Volusia County thinks Deltona’s planned service area is still too big. A hearing is planned Wednesday, Jan. 27, before the Volusia Growth Management Commission.

By Al Everson
BEACON STAFF WRITER

posted Jan 11, 2010 - 8:50:50am

Almost five years after it staked out a utility-service area miles beyond its city borders, Deltona is pulling back.

Volusia County government and two coastal cities, New Smyrna Beach and Edgewater, called on Deltona to back off. Now Deltona is ready to pull in the boundaries, at least a little.

Deltona Senior Planning Manager Ron Paradise said the county and cities were concerned about the size of the area Deltona wanted to claim for developing water and sewer customers.

“They said it extends beyond the statutory limit, which is true,” Paradise said.

The county still isn’t satisfied. It wants Deltona to shrink its service area even further. The matter will be the subject of a public hearing before the Volusia Growth Management Commission Wednesday, Jan. 27.

“The County is requesting the City ... revise the water supply plan to include only those areas within the City’s boundaries,” Deputy Volusia County Manager Mary Anne Connors wrote in a Sept. 29 letter to Deltona City Manager Faith Miller.

Many see the argument over Deltona’s utility service area as a fight over who will get to provide Farmton with water and sewer. Some also fear that having urban water and sewer services available will spur unwise development in the county’s rural core.

“The county believes that recognition of the city’s legally created service area is going to act as a spark plug for urban sprawl,” Paradise said.

The significance of a service area also lies in its potential for annexation. State law, specifically Chapter 180 of Florida Statutes, empowers cities to provide utilities and charge customers for the services, and then to annex those customers’ properties once the properties become contiguous to the city boundaries.

Volusia County planners want to see Deltona’s planning territory diminished.

At the same time, however, county government recently approved and is defending one of the most massive development proposals in Florida’s history: the Farmton project. The project covers some 59,000 rural and wooded acres in Volusia and Brevard counties, and would create the equivalent of two new cities over 50 years.

Deltona Mayor Dennis Mulder compared the Farmton project with Deltona’s annexation of the Leffler tract.

The annexation of the 5,000 or so acres northeast of Deltona city limits was struck down in 2006, after Volusia County sued the city.

The county had argued the Leffler spread was not sufficiently contiguous or adjacent to Deltona’s city limits, because it was connected to the city by only a small finger of land. The county is now eyeing the purchase of the Leffler tract as conservation land.

With the Leffler annexation overturned, Deltona is now proposing to redraw its utility-service area to make it conform to the 5-mile limit set by state law.

But Volusia County claims even the smaller Deltona service area is not consistent with the county’s state-mandated growth-management plan, commonly referred to as the comprehensive plan, or simply the comp plan.

“This is almost unprecedented for a county to ask a city to remand or remove its service area,” said Chris Bowley, Deltona’s director of Planning and Development Services.

When Deltona extended its service area in 2005, and also more recently, Volusia County officials publicly stated their concern that the service area would result in urban sprawl, because Deltona could annex the service area bit by bit, encroaching into the rural core of the county.

But Mulder questioned why the county would approve Farmton, but not the Leffler annexation.

“Is it that we’re saying that 5,000 acres is bad, but that 10 times that is OK?” Mulder asked Paradise.

“The irony of that is not lost on your staff,” Paradise replied.

Adding to the irony is Paradise’s past career as a county planner, where he worked on objections to Deltona’s actions and policies that could promote urbanization of the countryside.

Now, Paradise works for the City of Deltona, which has lost two planners, Greg Stubbs and Becky Mendez, who now work in the county’s Growth and Resource Management Department.

— al@beacononlinenews.com

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