A landfill is a hard decision. Hiding it made it an impossible one.
After nearly 11 hours of testimony Wednesday, Bunnell's City Commission voted unanimously to deny Project Butterfly, a 610-acre landfill its own planning board had approved in September — after a state economic-development law kept the project's details secret until shortly before that first vote. The denial fixes the secrecy. It does not fix the arithmetic: Flagler County is growing fast, growing counties produce waste, and waste that can't go here goes somewhere with less muscle to say no.
- The reversal: de novo hearing Oct. 28, ~11 hours, unanimous denial. Cocomero LLC's 610-acre landfill on County Road 45 conflicts with the city's comprehensive plan, including its agricultural-primacy policy; odor, farmland, and well-water concerns carried the night. The applicant's numbers — ~125 jobs, up to $1.1M a year in city revenue by year five — didn't. The project is dead unless Cocomero sues.
- The secrecy, not excused: project details were held confidential under Florida's economic-development law (§288.075) until shortly before the planning board approved it Sept. 1. Flagler County itself was among the 18 appellants demanding a fresh hearing. A landfill the neighbors can't read about isn't an approval — it's a reversal scheduled in advance.
- The confrontation: Flagler is one of Florida's fastest-growing counties. Every new roof adds tonnage; landfills are infrastructure, as unglamorous and necessary as sewers. 'Not here,' multiplied by every community with a hearing room, doesn't abolish waste — it exports it to wherever resistance is weakest, at longer hauls and higher cost.
- The proof the open way works: eleven hours of testimony produced a decision both sides watched being made, on the record, grounded in the comprehensive plan. A project that can survive that can be built. One that needs a confidentiality statute never stood.
Bunnell's City Commission did two things Wednesday night, and it's worth keeping them separate. The first took nearly eleven hours: a de novo hearing — a fresh, from-scratch review — of Project Butterfly, Cocomero LLC's proposed 610-acre landfill on County Road 45, ending in a unanimous vote to deny it. The second took no time at all, because it had already happened: the burial of a process that tried to approve a landfill in the dark.
Start with the dark, because nothing in this piece excuses it. The project's details were kept confidential under Florida's economic-development statute, §288.075, until shortly before the city's planning board approved it on September 1. Residents learned what was planned for land near their farms and wells more or less when the vote was upon them. Flagler County itself — the government next door — was among the 18 appellants who demanded the fresh hearing. Whatever else a 610-acre landfill is, it is not a surprise party. A decision a community has to live beside for decades gets made where the community can read it, question it, and watch it happen, or the decision doesn't deserve to stand. This one fell, and the secrecy is a large part of why it deserved to.
But a denial is not a disposal plan, and Thursday morning Flagler County woke up with the same arithmetic it had on Tuesday. It is one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida. Growth is not an abstraction there; it is rooftops going up by the subdivision, and every rooftop produces waste, every week, forever. That waste goes somewhere. A landfill is infrastructure in the plainest sense — as unlovely and as necessary as a sewer plant — and a county that permits the rooftops while refusing to site the disposal is not protecting its future, it's billing it to somebody else's. Multiply Bunnell's 'not here' by every hearing room in Florida and the tonnage doesn't vanish; it flows downhill, politically — to the rural community with the least muscle, at longer haul distances, at higher cost, decided by exhaustion instead of by plan.
Which is why the eleven hours matter as much as the verdict. In the open hearing, the case was made and answered in public: the comprehensive plan's agricultural-primacy policy, the odor and well-water evidence, the farmland — against the applicant's roughly 125 jobs and up to $1.1 million a year in city revenue by year five. The plan won. Whatever anyone thinks of the outcome, it is the kind that lasts, because both sides watched it being built. A project that can survive eleven hours of daylight can be sited, permitted, and defended in court if it comes to that. A project that needs §288.075 to slip past a September vote was never really approved at all.
So Bunnell fixed the process failure, and fixed it the right way: out loud. The capacity question is still on the table, and it will keep arriving with every plat the county approves. The next proposal — and there will be one, because the garbage is real — deserves the same daylight from day one, and a county honest enough to say in the open how much waste its growth makes and where it intends to put it. Secrecy got this landfill killed. Only openness gets the next one built — if it's worth building.