Some St. Johns County residents are worried that development will gobble up their county's rural character. l Steven Ponson, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 18, 2025 at 3:43 pm
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The St. Johns County Commission is once again trying to determine whether to strengthen its tree protection rules. After 2½ hours of discussion Tuesday, a handful of policy changes took one step forward.
The County Commission decided by a 3-2 vote to send a number of tree preservation ideas drafted by Chair Krista Joseph and county staff to a hired consultant. Consultant Inspire Placemaking will create drafts of new policies for some of Joseph’s ideas and provide insight into how others could be implemented.
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Among Joseph’s ideas:
- Making developers maintain as much as 20% of wooded and grassy areas compared to the 5% currently required,
- Increasing the amount of money developers must contribute to the county’s tree fund if they choose not to replace trees removed during the process of development,
- Preventing developers from clearing land long before any construction actually begins.
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Tree preservation has long been a priority of Joseph’s, and it’s something she said she intended to bring back before the County Commission after residents elected two new commissioners committed to slowing the county’s growth.
But not everyone was on board with Joseph’s approach to fighting for tree preservation.
Commissioners Anne Taylor and Clay Murphy supported her motion to move forward, but Commissioners Sarah Arnold and Christian Whitehurst opposed it.
Rather than scheduling a workshop that would allow more stakeholders to comment on the proposals, as Arnold argued for, Joseph advocated for moving ahead and asking questions later.
Arnold called the multihour discussion “political theater, not policy,” and Whitehurst said he couldn’t support a number of the policies that sounded to him like government overreach and a “land grab.”
“I think the trees on people’s private property belong to them; I think that’s philosophically where I’m at,” Whitehurst said Tuesday afternoon. “I think I’m not for no regulation, but we’ve got, up in my office, we have a 5-pound book of regulations in our land development code. That’s just the local-level regulations. That does not include the state binder, which I’m sure is bigger, or the federal government’s binder, which regulates what we can do on private property.”
Murphy shared some of Whitehurst’s concerns about government overreach as well as how policies aimed at big developers affect farmers and homeowners. But he voted to move the measures forward in hopes that a future discussion could iron out some of the finer points of the proposed rules.
A growing concern
St. Johns County’s tree regulations became a flashpoint in 2023 when Joseph pitched a multipronged approach to preventing clear-cutting of land and protecting more trees. Many of Joseph’s proposals from nearly two years ago were carried forward to today, but her collegues at the time did not support her suggestions.
Fast forward to 2025: Commissioners Murphy and Taylor campaigned on slowing the growth in St. Johns County, and Taylor pitched herself as someone who would vote in line with much of Joseph’s proposed slow-the-growth agenda.
Taylor and Joseph specifically acknowledged residents who they said put them in office because they wanted to see a change in St. Johns County — residents like Kerri Gustavson of Ponte Vedra who shared her thoughts with the county commissioners Tuesday morning.
“I’m not happy with the direction that the county is going, and that’s why I voted for change. I’m not saying that everything laid out today makes 100% sense, but what I’m saying is time is money,” she said. “What we voted for is to make it so that St. Johns County does not become a city county that looks like it’s just strip mall, strip mall, strip mall.”
Still, other speakers weren’t as supportive of Joseph’s agenda.
One speaker representing the Northeast Florida Builders Association said the regulations would put an undue burden on homeowners and encourage developers to fill in wetlands and pack preserved trees into far-flung corners of developments.
Other speakers, like Travis Minch of Ponte Vedra, argued that widening the criteria for protected trees would discourage residents from having towering live oaks on their properties to begin with.
Tense decorum
Joseph has been a vocal critic of Whitehurst and Arnold, two commissioners who she has accused of being in the pocket of big development companies.
While Arnold’s and Whitehurst’s campaigns for office did receive substantial contributions from members of the development community, the two have denied the assertion that they are developer mouthpieces or, as Joseph accused Whitehurst of Tuesday afternoon, in support of clear-cutting.
Including the period when the public attendees to the meeting were able to weigh in, the County Commission discussed the three conservation proposals for nearly three hours, some of which included accusations of undue behavior from one county commissioner to another.
The meeting began at 9 a.m. Tuesday with a move that set the tone for the discussion to come. Joseph argued that Arnold, who was absent from the county auditorium and attending the meeting by phone, should not be allowed to vote on matters because of her absence.
What followed was 45 minutes of back and forth that ended with Joseph following the advice of the county’s interim attorney that Arnold be allowed to vote.
Arnold told Jacksonville Today she chose to attend the meeting by phone because she is on a spring break vacation with her family — something the rest of the County Commission and the county administrator said they were unaware of until days before the meeting.
Arnold says she is “frankly shocked” that Joseph considered preventing her from fully participating in the meeting.
