In mid-March 2026, a handful of Hammock residents drove to a Flagler County Commission meeting to argue about a taco restaurant. Ed White, speaking for the Hammock Community Association, put it plainly to the commissioners: "We are looking forward to the tacos. That's a true statement. We need another restaurant, we just need it built in the right way." Vice Chairwoman Kim Carney distilled the frustration behind the whole debate that night: every restaurant in the Hammock has some kind of parking violation. "100% of them," she said. The commission tabled the application and sent the owners back to renegotiate.
The restaurant is Modern Mexx, and it will replace the aging Fusion 386 building at 5949 N. Ocean Shore Blvd. The application had been working through county review since a technical site plan first surfaced in December 2025, and the planning board had already approved setback and parking exceptions that February. Commissioner Greg Hansen said at the March meeting that the board had been "hornswaggled" one too many times on Hammock parking. The following month, on April 7, 2026, the commission approved it anyway, 3-2, over the objections of Hansen and Commissioner Andy Dance, who together have spent a combined 16 years on the commission fielding complaints from Hammock residents about overflow parking. The condition attached to that approval: keep a large oak tree standing at the rear of the property.
That single condition is the real story here. Nobody at that meeting was actually deciding whether Palm Coast needed another place to get tacos. They were deciding how many parking spaces one oak tree is worth. And once you notice that trade, you start seeing it everywhere in the Hammock, in restaurant applications, in housing proposals, in the county's own long-range planning documents. The tree isn't a landscaping detail out here. It's the actual currency people negotiate with.
What the Numbers Actually Traded Away
The math on Modern Mexx tells you how this works. County code required 41 parking spaces for a restaurant its size. The owners, county planning board member Mike Goodman, Bruce Garrison, and Bruno DiFabio, who also founded Bronx House Pizza, got approval for 33, plus six bike racks, by scaling the dining room down from 1,800 to 1,500 square feet and agreeing to save the oak. Their neighbor, Debra Jean's coffee shop, offered up five of its own overflow spaces to help close the gap. The new building will seat around 92 people, including a 20-seat bar, up from the 64 seats the old Fusion 386 building crammed into a space with only eight parking spots on site.
Debra Jean's has its own reason to want this corridor to keep working. The family behind the cafe has called the Hammock home since 1992, long enough to have watched restaurants along this stretch of A1A open and close. Their willingness to hand over parking isn't charity. It's the same logic playing out at a smaller scale: everybody here trades something to keep the character of the place intact while still letting new businesses in.
The Pattern Has a Name Already
Carney's math checks out against the neighbor she was implicitly describing. Bronx House Pizza, the Hammock location that Goodman also owns, ran into the identical problem when it opened and solved it the identical way. Once the crowds outgrew its lot, the restaurant bought a neighboring parcel in 2025 purely to use as overflow parking. Nobody on the commission disputed her when she made the same point about every other restaurant on this stretch of A1A.
So the actual system operating along this stretch of A1A isn't the county's official parking code. It's an informal exchange: a business asks for relief from a rule it can't physically meet on a narrow, tree-covered lot, and it pays for that relief in preserved canopy, purchased overflow land, or a favor to a neighbor. The code stays on the books. The trees stay standing. Everyone quietly understands the real terms.
The Same Fight, Bigger Stakes
The same trade is playing out right now over housing, at a scale that matters more to the neighborhood's future than any single restaurant.
On July 24, 2026, the A1A Scenic Pride Committee met with a development team from Stephenson, Wilcox & Associates to discuss Palmetto Preserve, a proposed 27-lot subdivision that needs a rezoning from resource conservation to planned unit development before it can move forward. Committee chair Connie Baillet didn't object to the idea of new housing. She objected to the design.
"We understand that there's development coming to the Hammock. We're not against development. We want the right kind of development."
Her follow-up explained exactly what "right" means here:
"You feel special in The Hammock because it's a natural area where we have our nice parks. We have the River to Sea, we have Bing's Landing, we have Malacampra, we have Jungle Hut, we have a lot of nice parks that are under a hammock of trees that is just a special place."
The committee's specific complaint about the Palmetto Preserve plan was that its 27 lots were drawn as a straight row of houses, with no attempt to work around the existing tree cover. That's the same negotiation Modern Mexx just went through, scaled up from one oak tree to an entire subdivision layout.
This Argument Has Been Running for Years
If this feels like a fight the Hammock has had before, that's because it has. In 2019, a developer proposed Beachwalk, a 50-home subdivision on less than 14 acres at the corner of A1A and Jungle Hut Road. The Hammock Community Association's attorney argued the density was too high and the tree loss too severe. Commissioner Hansen told the board directly he would support the project at 36 homes with the same buffers, but not at 50, calling the density "too dense for the character and ambience of the Hammock." The commission approved it anyway, 3-2, with houses under 2,000 square feet covering 60 percent of what had been wooded acreage.
Seven years later, the same argument is happening again over Palmetto Preserve, with different names on the podium but the identical tension: density and asphalt on one side, tree canopy and the neighborhood's sense of itself on the other.
The County Just Started Writing the Rule Down
What's changed is that this informal bargain may soon become official policy. At a July 13, 2026 meeting, the Flagler County Commission voted to re-transmit an updated version of the county's long-range comprehensive plan to the state, extending the planning horizon from 2035 out to 2050. One provision in that update would require the lowest-intensity zoning available for any property between State Road A1A and the Atlantic Ocean in the Hammock area. A local land use attorney at the meeting raised concern that the provision could be considered overly restrictive under a state law limiting how far local governments can go in regulating land use.
In other words, the county is trying to take a rule that residents have been enforcing meeting by meeting, oak tree by oak tree, and lock it into the comprehensive plan itself. Whether that survives state review is still an open question, but the intent lines up with everything happening on the ground.
The county has also been buying land outright rather than negotiating over it. In February 2026, staff began pursuing a 21-acre property called Cedar Point for the county's Environmentally Sensitive Lands program, a parcel sitting on the Intracoastal Waterway a third of a mile south of the River to Sea Preserve, owned by the DuPont family and home to a family cemetery. By May 2026, the county's ESL program had moved to make an offer on a Hammock property. Buying land outright sidesteps the whole variance-and-negotiation dance. It simply removes the property from the equation.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this shows up on a restaurant's Yelp page or in a headline about a new taco spot opening. But if you've wondered why every construction sign in the Hammock seems to sit untouched for a year before anything happens, or why residents show up to county meetings over a single tree, this is why. The parking spaces and the lot lines are the visible argument. The oaks are the real one.
The A1A Scenic Pride Committee and the Hammock Community Association both track these fights as they move through the county, and their meetings are open to anyone who lives here and wants to see how the next round plays out, whether that's a redesigned Palmetto Preserve or the next restaurant trying to open on a lot that was never built for modern parking counts.
We follow these same meetings and filings because they shape the daily experience of living along this stretch of coast, long before they ever touch a closing table. If you have questions about how a specific project or zoning change might affect your corner of the Hammock, Andy Kalcounos has spent 25 years watching this area grow and is glad to talk through what you're seeing. Let's Connect.
