Coral Springs is set to amend some of its corporate park rules to attract new investment and to encourage sustainable redevelopment of vacant and underutilized parcels within the park. The 450-acre park currently has 345 businesses with active licenses.

The idea is to give property owners incentives to go for development that is designed to achieve LEED certification. The city won’t insist on the certification but the zoning incentives would be subject to third party review, at the developer’s expense, by a LEED professional designated by the city. The incentives will allow developers to maximize square footage and make their projects economically viable.

The changes, made after many rounds of discussions with park property owners, include allowing hotels to increase the maximum height from 50 feet to 75 feet; limiting new self-storage development to the interior of the park and grandfathering existing development, and identifying specific employee-based offices in the code. Service-based uses like beauty shop, barber shop, nail salon, printing/copying, courier service, dry cleaning/laundry, florist, and book store have also been proposed along the perimeter of the park. The park has 88 vacant acres.

Developers who go for LEED-silver designed buildings will be given reductions in setbacks and landscaping. The front building setback for LEED buildings will be reducing from 50 to 25 feet for properties fronting on streets that have a width of 60’ or less. There is no minimum required percentage for landscape area for such buildings, compared to the 30 percent requirement for non-LEED buildings.