Planning commission backs broad LDC amendments: floor‑area rule for elevated coastal buildings, home‑occupation rewrite, tree fund changes

The Citrus County Planning and Development Commission voted to recommend approval of OA‑2024‑00006, a set of amendments to the county’s Land Development Code, at its February 2025 hearing and forwarded the package to the Board of County Commissioners.

The proposed ordinance package contains multiple, mostly technical changes. The most prominent is a revision to the definition of gross floor area for nonresidential buildings in coastal zoning categories: where a building is elevated to meet FEMA flood‑elevation standards, the draft change excludes the horizontal area beneath an elevated first floor ‘‘that is utilized exclusively for parking’’ from gross floor‑area calculations used to enforce floor‑area ratios (FAR) in certain coastal commercial and other nonresidential districts. Attorney Clark Stilwell, who spoke for a property owner with a coastal commercial rental project in Homosassa, said the revision would allow developers who elevate buildings to meet flood rules to provide parking beneath elevated units without triggering a large increase in FAR that could force deep reductions in unit count. Stilwell described a client project that would otherwise fall well above the 0.3 FAR cap in the Coastal Lakes Commercial category if the elevated parking were counted.

Planning staff said the change is countywide but limited in scope to nonresidential floor‑area calculations; it does not alter height limits (staff noted the county retains a…