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Boca Raton staff preview rezoning, design and traffic review steps for downtown government campus
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Summary
City staff asked the council to approve regulatory changes and form-based design rules to concentrate existing downtown entitlements near the new transit station and to require multimodal traffic mitigation; council set February 2026 as the target for key decisions.
Brandon Shadd, the city’s development services director, told the Boca Raton City Council at a Dec. 15 workshop that staff plans a package of comprehensive-plan amendments, DDRI boundary adjustments and land-development regulations the council could consider in February 2026 as part of the proposed downtown government campus project.
Shadd said the effort would not create new citywide development capacity but would reallocate existing downtown “office-equivalent” (OE) entitlements into subarea A — the block east of Northwest 2nd Avenue near the Brightline station — so development rights are concentrated near transit. He gave the current accounting: roughly 8,000,000 OE square feet were originally allocated downtown, about 725,000 OE remain citywide, pending projects would use roughly 160,000 OE, and the proposed transfers to subarea A would be on the order of 320,000 OE (Brandon Shadd).
Why it matters: the change would allow projects in the campus area to be evaluated under downtown standards, which Shadd said are intended to produce more walkable, transit-supportive places by focusing on building form, ground-floor activation and multimodal mitigation, rather than widening streets. He described use of the city’s alternative traffic concurrency standard (ATCS) to mitigate trip impacts with transit, bike and pedestrian investments and transportation demand management strategies.
Developer representatives presented how that regulatory package would be implemented on the ground. Bonnie Miskell, attorney for the Tara Frisbie Group, summarized a master plan that shows seven buildings with a program including 120,000 square feet of office, a 30,000-square-foot grocer on the ground floor, about 79,100 square feet of other commercial uses, a 180-room hotel and about 947 dwelling units across the site. Building 1 is shown at up to 100 feet (about nine stories) while Buildings 2–7 are shown up to 130 feet (about 12 stories) in the conceptual massing (Bonnie Miskell).
Miskell described detailed streetscape sections: Northwest 2nd Avenue would include a 16-foot median, two lanes each direction, parallel parking and 10-foot sidewalks with recessed promenades and bike buffers; a new pedestrian-only corridor called Via 1.5 would run from 4th toward Palmetto Park Road and provide a 50-foot building-face-to-building-face pedestrian street with ground-floor retail.
Council members pressed staff for specifics. On traffic management, Council member Wenger asked whether the TDM program could be adjusted between phases; Shadd said the council should require reevaluation in the development approval so the city can change mitigation measures if phase 1 produces unanticipated impacts. Others requested additional parking and circulation data, and some members urged the design team to “make it feel like Boca Raton” rather than generic contemporary architecture (Wenger; Bonnie Miskell; DeRanger).
Next steps: staff said it will continue drafting the LDR amendments and the downtown development order changes and intends to return with formal hearings and the items tied to the March 10, 2026 ballot timing for rezoning implications if the ballot measure passes. No formal legislative action was taken at the workshop.