Facebook group founder Kandi Stevens held her first community meeting with the help of residents Dara Knotts, Alan Lowe and other members of their team. Over 30 residents were in attendance for the meeting to ask questions, gather information and formulate next steps before the next business meeting January 16th, 2024 at 9am.
“So we’ve been going through different inspection reports, different details, different notes that you can find on the city website that you can go and look at the houses that were being built around you, and there’s a little tab that doesn’t look like a tab that you can click on, and it’ll show you all the notes and how many times they came out to set property for whatever reason, how many times they came out. So I found one, for example, and mine had to be the next thing, four times, four times they had to come out to put more dirt on the left side, which as a contractor knows, when you’re standing in the doorway, looking out the street, the left side is the left side. Okay, you’re not looking this way, you’re looking out the street, so I’m the left side.
So after I found that, I was like, there’s something going on here. There’s some kind of problem with something, so I started looking and started looking and we found the map that I’m gonna talk about, the new FEMA standards and all that stuff, and it appears that they were applying that all across the city, whether you’re in a flood zone or not. To me, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s why we’re here. So if you guys can go and start your own file, I have my own file, each of us have our own file on our own property, any correspondence you have on the city, your city connect case, the progress I’ve got, you’re gonna get emails on that, print those out and keep those, because it’s showing that you’re being proactive, trying to protect your property,” Kandi Stevens said during her presentation to the group of residents who attended the community meeting.
Kandi continued on, “We want to have prevention. We want them to change the building manual so it actually prevents this from happening in the future, and I know a lot of us have different ideas of things that need to be in that manual, and that’s kind of where we’re going to go from here, because the City Council wants to hear ideas from the city on ideas of what we think can fix the problem, okay? Because all of our properties are different. You might live on a corner. You might live between two houses, you know? We’re all different. All of our properties are different, so they can’t really say we’re going to put this kind of drainage in every house because it’s not going to work for every house.”
“I’ve been told by my council person is that they want us to come up with three or four ideas on how we think that we can fix the drainage issues and it’s only because they are listening to us because we’re showing up in numbers. I’ve never seen so many people at the council meeting since I’ve been here except for way back way in when I first moved here and we were having a major contested election. So, they’re listening to us,” Kandi Stevens said.
Council members Cathy Heighter and Ed Danko were also in attendance to hear what the residents had to say, the issues they are facing, and their ideas and solutions. Ed Danko took a few minutes at the end of the meeting to update residents on what the council is currently doing as well as what options they are considering for the next business meeting, including a possible moratorium on the development of infill lots until the technical manual and the building codes can be updated to prevent these flooding issues from continuing.
Council candidates Kathy Austrino and Peter Johnson were also in attendance to listen to the concerns of the residents of Palm Coast.
