Polk Commissioners Side With Developers; Back Off Proposed Impact Fee Hike

Rumors of a sudden major increase in impact fees in Polk County were, like Mark Twain’s death, exaggerated.
Instead, this week we had business as usual, a slow walk in implementing 100 percent of the consultant-recommended fee increases until 2027.
Impact fees are one-time charges on new construction that are intended to recoup the costs of the demand new development creates on traffic, park capacity, public safety and other local services They are imposed so that the expense does not fall on the backs of taxpayers in general who did not create the new demand for services.
Impact fees have been used for this purpose in Florida since 1965, but it was not until 1990 that Polk County commissioners began to impose them.
And, since then the commissioners’ philosophy has been to charge as little as possible in response to lobbying pressure from local homebuilders, who argued. the fees harmed their business.
This practice finally caught up with the county two decades ago.
So in 2005 a carefully choreographed series of public meetings organized by the local business community under banner of Polk Vision concluded the county’s policies had resulted in a $581.7 infrastructure deficit, $300 million of which involved unfunded road projects.
The solution was to approve the largest single property-tax increase in anyone’s memory to reduce the deficit and to consider additional and higher impact fees to prevent the deficit from recurring.
However, old habits are hard to break. The year before commissioners had appointed an Impact Fee Advisory Committee, which was dominated by folks from the development community and regularly recommended reducing impact fees.
Commissioners continued to balk at charging the full amount of impact fees consultants said were justified based on studies that are always required to adopt new impact fees.
Then when the real estate bubble burst in 2008. Commissioners voted to halve impact fees and by 2010 had approved what turned into a five-year moratorium on imposing impact fees.
When impact fees resumed in 2015, commissioners continued to charge lower rates than the consultants recommended.
This has continued and more recently the Florida Legislature, which has been increasingly becoming involved in local government decision-making, passed a law limiting how often and how much local officials could impose impact fees.
However, the law also allows local officials to charge more if they vote with a super-majority to declare they were facing a funding emergency and produced the data to back it up.
They declared the emergency all right, but when it came to a vote Tuesday, they decided it wasn’t much of an emergency after all.
Members of the local development community pushed the go-slow approach, arguing that a sudden increase was a “potential for disaster.” And so it went.
They also argued the increases would affect local residents who are buying new homes but neglected to mention that many of these new homes are in once rural areas once occupied by citrus groves and ranches once served by narrow country roads that are now faced with overwhelming new traffic demand.
The only person who testified in support of the impact fee increase was Tom Palmer, chair of the Ancient Islands Group, arguing commissioners had a choice taking a bold step or conducting business as usual.
Commission Chairman Bill Braswell, who was on the losing end of the 4-1 vote and initiated the discussion about a major impact fee increase, argued the costs the county incurs from dealing with new development is increasing and Tuesday’s vote “just kicked the can down the road.”
Meanwhile that road and all the others become more congested courtesy of the Polk County ‘Commission.
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