‘It’s going to cause a lot more chaos:’ Clay County neighbors protest possible new neighborhood

CLAY COUNTY, Fla. — From a new neighborhood to a new school, County Road 315 near Green Cove Springs is seeing a lot of change. It might not be slowing anytime soon.

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“It just seems like a square peg trying to go into a round hole,” says Curtiss Akim, the HOA President of the Willow Springs Neighborhood in Clay County.

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The Willow Springs neighborhood sits off county road 315, connecting to Shedd Road, an old dirt road bridging county road 315 and highway 17. It’s the site of the proposed 62-home community Action News Jax first told you about last month, which would be built on land only zoned for 4 homes, if approved.

“It’s just going to cause a lot more chaos,” says Ryan Marcyes, a longtime neighbor of Shedd Road.

One of the main concerns from homeowners in the area is the traffic already going through Shedd Road, both because of parents picking up and dropping off students at nearby Spring Park Elementary School and people using Shedd Road as a shortcut either to county road 315 or highway 17, depending on where you’re trying to go.

Read: The best places in Florida to raise a family; Clay and St. Johns Counties make the top 10

If you drive off County Road 315 into the Willow Springs neighborhood, the street’s about 45 feet across. But it condenses to around 24 feet by the point it meets Shedd Road. With the chance of more than 150 new cars coming through the area, should the proposed neighborhood be approved, homeowners don’t want the county going down that road.

“Our road isn’t wide enough to allow vehicles parked on the road and then buses and everything to get through,” Akim says.

Akim and Marcyes also tell me Shedd Road floods easily, worrying families who move into the neighborhood set to be built there could bear the burden after a day of bad rain. FEMA’s flood risk maps show the road sits near two flood zones. After last month’s heavy storm the First Alert Weather team tracked for days, Marcyes and Akim say the road was underwater.

“All of a sudden, the dry roads disappeared,” Akim says, “it looked like a lazy river that would float all the way from Willow Springs to Garber.”

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I reached out to the developer of the proposed neighborhood, who didn’t want to speak with Action News Jax. But, during Tuesday’s Clay County Planning Commission meeting, they said they’ve already been making changes to address the concerns.

For Marcyes and Akim, they don’t want to shed part of their home.

“Once this goes away, you won’t have the rural atmosphere a lot of these people moved out here for,” Marcyes says.

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The Clay County Planning Commission recommended to deny the neighborhood proposal this week. It’s not heading to the Clay County Board of commissioners, who will vote on it during the meeting on Jan. 23.

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