Planning Our Future?

We have a lot to talk about this week, so you are getting a special Sunday edition.

I want to chat a bit about the Strategic Planning Workshop that took place on Friday. This is the yearly meeting where commissioners get together and talk about things they want to accomplish in the near/long term future. These are generally high priority items like roads or the animal shelter.

I have to admit... I was not impressed with this planning session... I didn't really see a plan.. but that will be a future topic.

This particular meeting included a presentation by Metro Forecasting. This is the consultant that we hired in May 2024 to do forecasting models for our growth in Citrus County through 2050 or so.

We paid $300k for the initial contract work. This money came from Covid funds the county received from the Federal Government. We then signed a contract with them for access to the software they used for the modeling. This is propriety software and only available through Metro. We pay on an as needed basis going forward.

Further work was added to the contract for water services ($70k) and fire services ($35k) in June 2025. The money from water services came from professional services budget and the money from fire services came from impact fees.

To my knowledge, we still do not have the final report from Metro, but they were there Friday with a presentation.

Let's take a look.

To give you an idea of what the Interactive Growth Model is, here is the slide presented.

This next slide shows the number of homes built in each commission district over the last 5 years.

As you can see, District 3 is growing at a significantly faster rate than the others. This is the Beverly Hills, Pine Ridge and Citrus Springs area.

This showed the key findings of the study. Notably, Citrus is projected to continue growing until 2035-2040 where we will begin to see a decline.

This shows the projected number of houses in the County. The year 9995 is there as the buildout total. That is when building will largely be completed here in Citrus sometime after 2050 (but not projecting to 9995).

This next map is interesting. It shows all the homes build since 2024.

This next map shows the commercial buildings in the county. Metro mentioned that we need to take a look at where we are adding commercial space as most of it is not around the houses being built. He suggested that we begin to look at adding more commercial around those residential areas, particularly in the northern part of the county, to limit road miles traveled.

This next slide shows the existing RV parks and the proposed RV parks. He made an interesting comment in saying that we are "The RV capital of the world". He went on to say that we are unique in the number of RV parks/resorts we have in this county as other counties do not come close. He did mention there was an opportunity here to capture more revenue for impact fees and whatnot from these parks. Not sure if we are currently collecting those.

Also not sure if we want to be known as the RV Capital of the World either.

This one shows demand for larger type shopping centers through 2050. It is suggested that we will need 4 more before then. This next slide shows how much commercial square footage that we have per person. Currently that is around 79sqft per person. He would like to see us closer to 90sqft per person.

In other words, we need 11 more sqft per person, which equates to about another 1.8million sqft of commercial space... or 13.3 more stores the size of Target.

This next slide shows his recommendations.

The thing I want to point out here is that we currently have 53,600 platted lots in this county. These are lots that homes can be built on today. Importantly, it does NOT include projects like Tuscany that have ZERO platted lots at this moment. Add several more thousand to that number (closer to 10k)... plus whatever is proposed in the future (Betz Farm, Post Oak Ranch, etc).

Next we take a look at fire. This first slide shows a chart comparing response times. This is data over the past 3 years. The county has set a level of service of a 8 minute or less response time for 90% of the calls that come in.

As you can see, we are WAY off that number. On average, only 43% of the calls met that level of service. 57% of the calls took longer than 8 minutes. He suggests that this is due to the growth in the county resulting in more calls and the lack of growth in the fire department to meet the desired level of service.

It is suggested that we will need 4 more fire stations before 2050 to service the number of calls we will have from continued growth. He goes on to say that 2 of those stations need to be built by 2030.

Let's talk about this for a minute. The consultant that we hired to help us forecast growth and show our deficiencies has stated that we are short fire stations and need to get them built ASAP.

Where in the world are we getting money for 2 new fire stations? We have a $750m backlog in roads. We have an animal shelter. We have 491 expansion. We have $400m or so in space needs. This county is going to be bankrupt trying to address all the needs we have here.

Where are we getting millions to not only build the stations but then buy the equipment, hire the staff and operate the stations?

This is where the BOCC has failed us.

Look at the Tuscany project. As part of the original development agreement in the 80's, they owed us a two bay fire station. That was also part of the final agreement, but why did we not negotiate a full 3 or 4 bay station as part of the approval? As it is, they owe use 2 bays and we build the rest. That was a perfect time to negotiate the full fire station, maybe crediting impact fees or something like that.

Why did we not negotiate these things for other projects? Crystal Ridge over by Rock Crusher is adding 2000 or so homes. This study suggest a need for a fire station around 491/44. Why did we not ask them to contribute towards this... or the project going in behind Race Trac?

We had the opportunity to negotiate these things as part of the development approvals, but we did not do so. Also, prior boards never thought to set money aside for these big capital projects.

It is crazy to me to see project after project approved and ZERO discussion on what that looks like for things like fire services and public safety. That does not mean to ban all growth, but let's have some discussion on these projects and see what concessions we can get.

Afterall, they NEED the BOCC to approve their project because they are not allowed to do it otherwise. The reason they are there in the first place is because they are not allowed to do their project as it does not meet the Comp Plan, LDC or both (most of the time).

And the crazy thing in all this... the BOCC did not even put fire services on the list for the targets for this year. Did not hear much talk on how they will address that.

That is enough drivel for today.

I will write more later this week and focus on the park aspect of this presentation that I did not cover today.

Enjoy your Sunday!