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Planning board backs tougher stormwater standards, recommends LDR amendment to commission
Summary
The New Smyrna Beach Planning & Zoning Board voted 7-0 to recommend ZT-6-24, an update to Article 6 of the Land Development Regulations that raises stormwater design thresholds, adopts NOAA-based rainfall values and adds freeboard, roadway drainage and maintenance criteria.
The New Smyrna Beach Planning & Zoning Board voted unanimously Jan. 6 to recommend that the City Commission consider ZT-6-24, a proposed text amendment to Article 6 of the city’s Land Development Regulations that significantly tightens local stormwater and drainage design standards.
City staff presented the amendment as an effort to add definitions, numeric design thresholds and maintenance criteria that staff and consultants say the current code lacks. “This project actually started about three years ago,” Shane Corbin, director of development services, told the board, asking members to forward the draft to the commission.
The amendment replaces vague or missing design guidance with specific, data-driven criteria. Senior civil engineer Ton Wen said the draft adopts NOAA rainfall data for New Smyrna Beach and proposes a 100-year, 72-hour rainfall value of 16.2 inches to guide closed-basin designs; the update would also tighten allowable post-development discharge, add freeboard requirements (for example, 12 inches for retention ponds), and add roadway/street inlet and conveyance tables for engineers.
Consultant Kevin Lee of Parker Minchenberg and Associates said the new tables and slope requirements aim to make open conveyances maintainable and to align capture rates and inlet sizing with DOT and other local standards. “The design criteria that we’ve added here gets you to one that they could maintain long term, and the HOA can maintain,” Lee said.
Board members pressed staff on how the regulation would be enforced and whether the draft accounts for future climate-driven changes. Staff said St. Johns County and NOAA data form the evidence base for the numeric thresholds, and that the city is conducting a stormwater master plan whose modeling (expected to deliver new data in phases through April 2026) could refine elevations and tailwater conditions used in project-level design. Staff also said state permit conditions and post-construction maintenance plans provide mechanisms for follow-up inspections.
Public speakers said they support raising standards but urged clearer links between policy, code and enforcement. Cindy Smizak said she appreciated the effort but called for “a clean line of sight between actions taken in policy … and how enforcement works.”
After questions and discussion about inspection schedules, impervious coverage, tailwater elevations and whether the city should review design standards regularly, a board member moved that the Planning & Zoning Board recommend approval of ZT-6-24 to the City Commission. The board recorded a roll-call recommendation of 7-0.
What happens next: The board’s recommendation forwards ZT-6-24 to the City Commission for formal consideration and possible adoption; staff told the board the item could move to the commission within weeks. Separately, the city’s stormwater master plan—still underway—will provide additional modeling that staff said could be used to refine elevations and other technical inputs.
