Delays ahead? Why a West Delray landowner will take more time on plan for homes, retail, hotel

A Palm Beach County landowner will take a few more months to refine a proposal for hundreds of new homes, a hotel, stores and more in West Delray, reacting to concerns from some residents about the plan.

County commissioners voted unanimously to push back an initial public hearing for the project, called Park West, for at least a few months — much to the chagrin of several people at the meeting who are against the plan and wanted to hear about it on Wednesday. “We are all here. We’re all ready, and we’re going to let the chips lie,” said Linda Smithe, the executive committee chair of the Sierra Club Loxahatchee Group.

Jennifer Morton, the president of JMorton Planning & Landscape Architecture and who is behind the proposal, said the project received more comments and letters of objection Monday that require time to regroup, which the team will do throughout the next three months before going back to the commission with a plan in August.

Commissioner Maria Marino said the project as currently proposed “isn’t palatable to a lot of people.” But that does not mean the commission should flat-out deny the project and “say nothing is going to be in this property,” she said during the meeting.

“Everybody has a right to use their property,” she said.

The project should return to the commission more digestible, though, she said.

If approved, the project would rise on two sites: a 50-acre plot of land wedged at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Florida’s Turnpike, east of Starkey Road, and a 10-acre plot east of Persimmon Avenue and directly south of Atlantic Avenue.

Delray Marketplace, the West Atlantic Business Plaza and Delray Lake Estates are all nearby developments.

The plan would bring forth more than 700 multifamily units, a 150-room hotel, hundreds of thousands of square feet of storage, commercial retail and office space. It also pitches an “indoor adventure rec and workspace,” a neighborhood grocery, workforce housing, a main street, town center and a public preserve.

The project, previously dubbed Tenderly Reserve, was originally headed to the county’s planning commission in January, but the hearing was pushed back. The planning commission then recommended denial of the project on April 12.

Opponents to the proposal largely take issue with the developer’s requests for county policy exemptions, which include:

• Upping density to 12 units per acre.
• Exemption from a county traffic policy that determines the impact of traffic brought in by development through studies, which opponents feel is significant because the project could bring a lot more traffic to an already-congested area.
• Allotting only 20% of the total project to preserve land, a little more than 16 of the 60 acres, and allow water management to count as part of that preservation. Normally, development proposals in the Agricultural Reserve adhere to the 60/40 rule, which states 60% of land must be preserved — not necessarily all in the same place — to allow for 40% to be used for development.

The proposal seems to ignore the Ag Reserve comprehensive plan, argued Joseph O’Donnell, who, along with his wife, owns Irish Acres, a horse farm on Starkey Road north of where Park West would be built.

“If they followed the comprehensive plan preservation requirements, a great deal of our reservations would be removed,” he said.

The West Delray area is also already rife with retail, O’Donnell said, and he’d like to see the hotel removed from the project as well as fewer housing units, which would lessen the future traffic burden.

The Park West site’s landowner, who is Paul Okean, the applicant behind the proposal and the builder of Morningstar Nursery Inc., has the right to put something there, O’Donnell said, but the county’s rules should be followed.

“Not just so their rights are protected, but my rights are protected,” he said.

During the April planning commission meeting, Okean said he’d acquired the land more than 40 years ago when the nursery industry was thriving, but he’s now looking to use the land for other pursuits, such as alleviating the county’s housing crisis by bringing in more homes, including workforce housing units.

Though the development may now experience revisions before it is presented to the commission, some people are still not convinced changes would be enough.

Barbara Roth, the newly elected president of the Coalition of Boynton West Residential Associations, or COWBRA, likened the project’s postponement to the “dragging” on of the GL Homes’ land-swap proposal. In that past instance, the County Commission in 2022 agreed to give a developer more time to go over “unresolved points” before voting on a proposal, and the plan ultimately was not adopted last year.

On the Park West proposal, Roth said during the recent meeting, “We would urge you to consider if this comes back in August for complete denial.”