Megan McKinley was the lone attendee during the Ponte Vedra Municipal Service District meeting on Nov. 13 and spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting.
According to McKinley, who also serves as a member of the Ponte Vedra Zoning and Adjustment Board, she and several residents are disappointed in the process that was taken during the previous MSD meeting in October, which ended in an unofficial vote being taken where the majority of trustees voted in favor of the PUD application.
“It was a vote that was not properly noticed and therefore not in accordance with state law,” McKinley said. “I was very disappointed in the members of the MSD who took this action, disregarding the intense interest of the members of the community who did attend the meeting. Their (residents) disappointment has been voiced to me since that time and you can see that they are not at the meeting tonight, because they said, ‘why bother, they don’t listen to us.’”
MSD chairman Al Hollon informed McKinley that he had sent a letter to the Commissioners advising them of what the board had done in four meetings discussing the issue as part of the agenda. He did not send them a resolution because the vote taken was unofficial.
“I want to be factually accurate, and I decided on my own that four meetings was enough for this board to consider that matter and I didn’t want to put them through a fifth meeting, and that’s why I didn’t call a special meeting,” Hollon said. “It was within the parameters of the law.”
Hollon understands that it was a passionate issue for a lot of people on both sides and that he believes the MSD did its due diligence in dissecting all the information available to them.
“There are often issues like that where the public is going to have opposing viewpoints and there’s no that you can reconcile some of those positions,” Hollon said. “I did what I thought was right.”
McKinley is the second resident with ties to the PVZAB to speak her mind about the process of the PUD application and how it was handled.
Jane Rollinson now a former member of the PVZAB, spoke concerning the PUD application and resigned following the Commission’s announcement due to the lack of consideration she believed it gave to the board’s recommendation during its decision process.
In this case, it was McKinley who voiced her displeasure with the MSD and the way they went about unofficial supporting it.
“Whether you were for or against it, the process is what is flawed,” McKinley said.
In other news from the MSD meeting, trustee Charles Callaghan informed the MSD that he has been in communication with Beaches Energy to turn back on 12 streetlights in the 400 to 500 block of Ponte Vedra Boulevard, which had previously been turned off for sea turtle nesting season, which has ended.
The MSD also approved up to $1,500 a piece to add two streetlights at darker sections of the roadway, with one at Le Master Drive and Poinciana Way and the other at 33 Corona Road.
