Osprey Isles Archives

Exclusive: D.R. Horton, local landowner offer community $650,000 to back townhomes

Agreement calls for Rustic Lakes Property Owners Association to get the money if Palm Beach Gardens City Council rezones site on Northlake Boulevard.

One of the country’s largest home builders and a local landowner have agreed to pay the board of a rural Palm Beach Gardens community $650,000 to withdraw its opposition to a plan to build 111 townhomes on Northlake Boulevard.

The money would be paid only if the rezoning passes. The Palm Beach Gardens City Council is scheduled to take up the matter Aug. 3.

But not everyone in the community of Rustic Lakes supports the deal, and many residents who still oppose the development said they had no say in their board’s decision.

“You’re trying to stack up little boxes, 111 of them, in front of a community of only 62 homes. It doesn’t fit,” resident Vanessa Saridakis said. “The majority of this community — I’m trying to find the right words — is dead set against it.”

How Palm Beach Gardens reached so far west

City’s recent annexation flowed from a massive annexation more than 30 years ago.

With last week’s Palm Beach Gardens City Council vote finalizing the decision to annex 300 acres along Northlake Boulevard, we look back on how Palm Beach Gardens spread so far west in the first place, a story first told on the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society Facebook page.

What is now Avenir and the Sandhill Crane Golf Club came into the city in a 5,638-acre annexation in March 1991.

The biggest piece was the 4,763-acre ranch owned by Charlie Vavrus, who at the time proposed a city for 42,000 residents. That land is now called Avenir, approved in 2016 for nearly 4,000 homes. And they’re rising rapidly.

Northlake widening study pits county vs city. Again.

Palm Beach Gardens City Manager tells council that Palm Beach County engineer abruptly backed out of a meeting to share information about county’s $400,000 study of eight-laning Northlake Boulevard east of the Beeline.

Palm Beach County wants to spend $400,000 to study eight-laning Northlake Boulevard from Military Trail to Beeline Highway.

Palm Beach Gardens and its many homeowners associations along the six-lane roadway want no such thing.

But the potential to talk out their differences blew up publicly last week when County Engineer David Ricks refused to attend a meeting with Palm Beach Gardens City Manager Ron Ferris.

“I got a phone call from David Ricks, who said he was advised from higher ups at the administration level he is not to meet with the city of Palm Beach Gardens,” Ferris told City Council members Thursday night.