Carolyn DiPaoloBack-to-office push packs too many cars onto Juno Beach plant-adjacent lot.
Juno Beach-based FPL is so desperate for more employee parking that it asked the town for permission to pave over part of a small nature preserve at its headquarters to build a 200-space parking lot.
Members of a town board turned down the request this month, prompting FPL to withdraw it. Still, its presentation offers insight into the utility’s operation and how its parking solution was complicated by one of the rarest shrubs in the United States.
FPL shares its Juno Beach campus with parent and corporate giant NextEra Energy. The 58-acre property on U.S. 1 and Universe Boulevard is filled with coastal native plants and bound by a town agreement to preserve them. The headquarters has 900,000 square feet of offices across five buildings and makes up about half of the commercial space in Juno Beach.
On any given business day, the number of workers on the property nearly doubles the population of the 3,900-resident town.
Since 2020, the company has reconfigured those buildings, replacing offices and cubicles with open space, and adding large and small conference rooms to encourage in-person collaboration, Don Kiselewski, FPL’s executive director of external affairs, told the town Planning and Zoning Board on June 1.
The company also embraced the post-COVID back-to-office trend.
Today, the property’s 3,094 parking spaces cannot accommodate the 3,300-member workforce, Kiselewski said.
He described the parking shortage as a safety issue.
“Our employees, although well-intentioned, are parking in a haphazard, unsafe manner,” Kiselewski said. He said as many as 100 cars a day are typically improperly parked.
Meet the four-petal pawpaw
To meet the need, FPL asked the town to approve a site plan change and depart from a 1984 town resolution that requires any additional parking on the property to be under a building or in a parking garage.
Forty-four years later, FPL proposed a 229-space parking lot on 1.7 acres at the center of 3 acres of open space, describing it as low-quality scrub.
“There are no gopher tortoises, and there are not any scrub jays in that area that we intend to impact,” Kiselewski said.
But there are six extremely rare four-petal pawpaw shrubs. The shrub is found only in a 35-mile stretch of coastal scrub in Martin and Palm Beach counties.
The four-petal pawpaw survives in dry, sandy soils and is important ecologically for pollinators, such as butterflies, beetles, bees and wasps. It has green, leathery leaves and is a member of the custard apple family. A more widespread member of the family is the pond apple.
A federal review in 2022 found that four-petal pawpaws are in decline, with just 1,400 known plants in the wild. The plant can be found on public lands including Jonathan Dickinson State Park, Juno Dunes Natural Area and the tiny PawPaw Natural Preserve in North Palm Beach.
And at FPL’s headquarters in Juno Beach.
Giving back to Juno Beach
During his presentation, Kiselewski emphasized FPL’s commitment to being a good neighbor. The company has contributed $1.8 million to the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach and routinely offers its thousands of parking spaces to ArtFest by the Sea and TurtleFest.
FPL also takes pride in its environmental record. In 2011, its headquarters achieved Gold-level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, the second-highest level, from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Company representatives, who did not return requests for comment, pledged to protect the rare and endangered plants near the proposed parking lot and launch a program to harvest and replant four-petal pawpaw seeds.
But the 2022 federal review stressed how fragile the pawpaw plants are. For example, at Lake Park Scrub, dozens of saplings and nearly 200 seeds were planted in 2005, the report said. In 2021, observers found only five plants from seed. By 2022, none of the transplanted saplings survived at the Lake Park site.
Town principal planner Stephen Mayer told board members that the main reason the southern scrub area is of the least value is that FPL has not thinned or removed the proliferation of sand pines as a preserve area management plan adopted in 1993 intended.
He added that FPL’s new plan does not have the same ecological value as the existing open space.
Board members questioned what other parking solutions FPL had pursued, including building a parking garage or shuttling workers from remote parking lots.
FPL Director of Construction Jon Rosenthal countered that building a parking garage would cause more of a parking crunch during construction and permanently eliminate drive lanes and parking spaces present today.
The company has struggled to identify suitable property near the headquarters for remote parking, he said.
What about shuttling employees from FPL’s corporate office building at I-95 and PGA Boulevard? Board member Carol Rudolph asked. Rosenthal said the company is managing a parking shortage on its Palm Beach Gardens campus as well.
The proposal reminded at least two board members of the famous Joni Mitchell lyric.
“You know, ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,’” Steve Bauch said. “And that’s really kind of what’s at stake here.”
Nancy Grabowski repeated the lyric and added, “We don’t want to be anywhere U.S.A.”
The board declined FPL’s request by a 4-1 vote. FPL withdrew the request two days later.
‘Maxed out’
Bauch, who supported the change to allow a parking lot, described FPL’s plan as a fair compromise.
But Grabowski was swayed by her town predecessors, who put the 1984 parking requirement in place.
“Now, why did they do that?“ she said. “They knew that there would be an additional need for parking. Should that be the case, what they wanted to ensure to the public and to everyone — and which FPL was amenable to at the time — was that no additional open space be impacted.”
Board member Robert Reimers also voted against the change.
“Quite frankly, the population of this center never should have gotten to 3,300,” he said. “It’s about 10 pounds of sausage in a 5-pound bag. That’s what you are trying to do here. This site is maxed out.”
The planning board decision follows the town’s March election that overwhelmingly elected three council members who promised to protect town residents from overdevelopment. Two Juno council members have ties to FPL. Mayor Dave Santilli is a retired FPL engineer and Diana Davis spent 16 years as FPL corporate counsel.
During the public comment portion of the meeting, Juno Beach resident Siobhan O’Donnell thanked the planning board.
“To hear the brain power and the intelligence and the humor of our board is just so wonderful,” she said. “It’s such a change. The election brought such great change to our town that was really battered by the special interests.”
