UPDATED, Nov. 9, 11:55 a.m.: Developer Brian Tuttle won rezoning and site plan approval last week for his planned cluster of 205 single-family homes on 76 acres in Parkland.
The Parkland Royale Phase 2 development site includes a property known as Gator Acres, with nearly 5 acres of land in unincorporated Broward County that the city of Parkland plans to annex under an agreement with Tuttle.
Before he signed the annexation agreement with the city on Sept. 13, Tuttle had been seeking Broward County’s approval to develop a four-story multifamily complex with as many as 100 units on unincorporated Gator Acres while planning single-family homes on the rest of the site, which lies in Parkland.
Instead, most of Gator Acres will become a 4-acre city park, in a donation to Parkland that Tuttle valued at $3.8 million. The site plan for Parkland Royale Phase 2 also features slightly less than three houses per acre, four small lakes, and a community clubhouse, swimming pool, and playground.
“It was actually the city of Parkland that called the developer [Tuttle] back to the table after he decided he was going to go to Broward,” Commissioner Jordan Isrow said at the city commission meeting Wednesday night. “He gave us a second bite at the apple.”
“We should control the property,” Parkland commissioner Ken Cutler said of Gator Acres at the meeting. “We should be the ones in the driver’s seat and not let the county come in and do whatever it is they want to do, and have them make decisions for us.”
At their meeting Wednesday, city commissioners rezoned the development site, approved the site plan for Parkland Royale Phase 2, and lifted a deed restriction that limited housing construction there to age-restricted projects for residents 55 and older. The commission also approved a plat proposal that mirrors the site plan for Parkland Royale Phase 2 and granted six variances from zoning rules embedded in the plan.
When Parkland Royale Phase 2 is built out, the home sales will total about $158 million, Tuttle said at the commission meeting.
Tuttle assembled and entitled an adjacent site for the first phase of Parkland Royale, now called Four Seasons at Parkland, then sold it to K. Hovnanian Homes in 2014 for $53 million.
The 76-acre Parkland Royale Phase 2 site is in the northwest corner of Parkland along Loxahatchee Road. It is an area next to the Everglades known as the “Wedge,” where the most prominent landmarks are two communications towers that are more than 300 feet tall.
Two Florida-registered limited liability companies own the Parkland Royale Phase 2 development site, TLH Sabra2, LLC and TLH-70 NSID, LLC. On its website, Tuttle’s Hillsboro Beach-based company Tuttle Land Investments lists parcels within the development site among “deals currently under contract.”
Engineers will drain part of the damp development site along the eastern edge of the Everglades. “We’ve obtained a drainage permit from the South Florida Water Management District for the project,” Bill Barbaro of Carnahan Proctor Cross in Deerfield Beach, the project engineer, told commissioners. “We’ve designed this [site] to be higher to provide sufficient drainage,” Barbaro said. “We’ve established finished floors that are high and will accommodate FEMA’s adjustments to FEMA flood maps.”
North of Tuttle’s Parkland project, he assembled the site of Tuttle Royale, a 200-acre mixed-use development in Royal Palm Beach.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the speaker of a quote at the meeting.