New construction sells on an assumption most buyers never say out loud: something built recently must have already been checked. Concrete poured to code. Drainage engineered correctly. The parts of a neighborhood nobody thinks to inspect themselves, because someone with a clipboard supposedly already did.
In Mosaic, the master-planned community ICI Homes has been building off LPGA Boulevard in Daytona Beach since 2018, that assumption ran into two specific numbers. In 2019, the city reduced the performance bond covering one phase of the neighborhood's sidewalks from $304,427.17 down to $6,089.00. A neighboring phase saw its bond cut by more than $316,000. Combined, those two reductions released well over $614,000 the developer no longer had to keep on hand to guarantee the sidewalk work behind it.
By 2025, residents were documenting what that guarantee had actually covered.
What a Performance Bond Is Supposed to Do
A performance bond is money held in trust until a developer's infrastructure work is finished and inspected. It exists so that if a sidewalk, a stormwater line, or a stretch of road turns out to be built wrong, the city has funds on hand to fix it without asking the developer to come back, and without asking taxpayers to cover it either. The bond only gets released once the work passes inspection. That is the entire point of the mechanism.
In Mosaic, the sidewalks in question were sloping the wrong direction. Instead of draining toward the street, they pitched back toward the homes. Resident Brenda Pruiett-Fouser described what that produced in plain terms: water pooling with algae and slime developing on the walking surface. Neighbor John Buttrey said the fix, until the city stepped in, was power washing the sidewalks every two to three months just to keep them usable.
Over a six-month stretch, residents started counting falls themselves. One outlet reported more than 40. Another put the number above 50. Either way, it was enough that Daytona Beach Commissioner Stacy Cantu opened her own investigation into how a still-young neighborhood had already produced dozens of documented injuries on infrastructure the city had signed off on years earlier.
Two Accounts of the Same Signature
Here is where the record gets genuinely contested. Reporting at the time described the situation as the city admitting it had signed off on the sidewalks without proper inspections, with former City Manager Jim Chisholm approving the bond reductions in 2019 based on memos from then-Public Works Director Holmes. One reduction notice in that same paper trail carries the name of Deric Feacher, now the city's current manager, from earlier in his career with the city.
Cantu, after a public records request that initially came back marked as lost, tracked down the inspection files herself and reached a different conclusion. Every inspection on record had passed, she said. Her argument wasn't that the sidewalks were built correctly. It was that the city's own inspectors had signed off regardless, which meant the responsibility sat with the city no matter which version of the story turned out to be more complete.
"The city was very, very messy, and now the residents have had to pay for it," Cantu told the commission. "Our residents that don't even live in Mosaic, are having to pay for this mistake."
That line is the thesis of the whole story, and it's worth sitting with before moving to the numbers.
The Bill Nobody Reserved For
Whatever combination of skipped inspection and premature bond release actually occurred, the cost of fixing it came due in 2026, not 2019. The city began soliciting bids in October 2025, reviewed ten of them, and commissioners approved a contract for the city's portion of the repair work in the spring of 2026, reported at $1.1 million by most outlets and $1.2 million by at least one. Under the final agreement, the city took responsibility for three sections of sidewalk, while ICI Homes agreed to handle two additional sections and contribute roughly $300,000 toward redoing the pavers. Construction on the city's share was scheduled to run through the summer of 2026.
Add it up and the repair bill lands somewhere north of $1.4 million, to fix exactly what a combined $614,000 in bonds was supposed to guarantee seven years earlier. The gap between those two numbers is the real lesson here. A bond covers the cost of the fix at the moment it's released. It does not adjust for what the fix will cost once the problem has had years to compound, and it does not automatically follow the developer once the city has already signed off and moved on. When the defect surfaces later, the entity holding the bill is usually the city's general fund, which draws from every taxpayer in Daytona Beach, not a line item still earmarked for Mosaic specifically.
What This Means If You're Comparing New Construction to an Established Community
Mosaic is still an active build. Homes there have continued selling through 2026, with the median sale price running around $678,000 as of mid-July 2026, up roughly 6 percent over the prior twelve months and up about 83 percent since the community opened in 2018. None of that appreciation appears to reflect a market discounting for the sidewalk situation. Buyers have kept showing up.
That's useful context, but it's not the same as a clean bill of health on every piece of shared infrastructure a still-building neighborhood will eventually turn over to the city. Compare that to a community like Plantation Bay in Ormond Beach, built out in phases from 1986 through 2024. In a community with that kind of runway, most of its roads, drainage, and common infrastructure have already had decades to reveal problems, and if something similar had happened there, it would likely already be settled history rather than an open news story.
Neither situation is inherently riskier. They're just different points on the same timeline. Buying into an actively building community means trusting a bond release process whose outcome you can't yet see. Buying resale in a mature one means the track record has already had time to show itself, for better or worse.
A few questions are worth asking directly, regardless of which kind of community you're considering:
- When were performance bonds tied to shared infrastructure, sidewalks, roads, stormwater, actually released, and is there a public record of the inspection that preceded it?
- What does the builder's warranty cover versus what falls under a municipal bond? Structural warranties on the home itself typically run for years, but they rarely extend to the sidewalk out front or the street it sits on, since that infrastructure gets deeded to the city, not the homeowner.
- Has the subdivision come up in city commission meeting minutes? That's often where a problem like this surfaces months before it becomes local news.
- If you're buying resale in an older phase, has that phase gone multiple years without a similar complaint on record? Age alone doesn't guarantee anything, but a longer clean track record is a data point a two-year-old phase simply can't offer yet.
None of this is a reason to avoid new construction. It's a reason to ask who is actually standing behind the parts of the neighborhood you'll never personally inspect, and when that guarantee was last checked rather than just assumed.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Did the sidewalk issue affect home values in Mosaic? There's no public data tying resale prices to the repair story. Sales through mid-2026 show continued price growth in the neighborhood.
Is this specific to Mosaic, or does it happen elsewhere? Performance bonds are standard practice on essentially every new subdivision in Florida. What made Mosaic's case notable wasn't the mechanism itself, but that a commissioner and a group of residents pushed hard enough to make the paper trail public.
Who keeps records of bond status on a specific subdivision? City public works departments typically hold that documentation, tied to the plat for each phase. It's a reasonable thing to ask about before writing an offer on a home in a community that's still under construction.
If you're weighing a still-building community against an established one anywhere in Palm Coast, Flagler Beach, Ormond Beach, or Daytona Beach, the difference often comes down to exactly this kind of question, not the finish package or the amenity list. Andy Kalcounos has spent 25 years working through that comparison with buyers on both sides of it. Let's Connect if you want a second set of eyes before you sign anything.
