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In Lake County, our impact fees for new construction of houses and commercial buildings are fixed based upon sq ft and property type.
The impact fee revenue is used to pay for added roads, schools, fire stations, and parks to handle the increased population.
However, the impact fees are FIXED bacause there is no variable rate based upon distance from existing schools or defined population or commercial centers. Thus someone who develops a 400 unit housing development in a town near an existing school pays the same as someone who creates a new development in the boonies, 25 miles from existing schools or towns. The distance means that the County must build new schools and roads to handle the distant population.
It seems to me that environmentalists want town centric development, and land owners, development attorneys, certain lumber yard owners and builders want the ability to create developments anywhere in Lake County, and not pay ANY impact fees. They want to shift the cost of new infrastructure to ALL taxpayers by using gas taxes or increased general property taxes (which subsidizes the profits of the developers, in my opinion). See Scott Maxwell's column in the Orlando Sentinel HERE.
The current method of fixed impact fees does not reward a developer for creating new projects NEAR existing schools and towns, which would reduce the need to build roads, schools, parks, fire stations, etc.
We need a method to establish variable impact fees based upon the REAL cost of creating distant developments vs those that are created near existing infrastructure. That would create an incentive to reduce sprawl, and make environmentalists and growth control people happier while also allowing developers to build anywhere, but absorb more of the infrastructure cost by doing so.
Thus a developer of "in-fill" properties in existing population or commercial areas would pay much less than those who choose to build 20 miles away from existing infrastructure.
Do you readers know of any County in FL or elsewhere that uses variable impact fees based upon distance from existing infrastructure?
Update: 5:45 pm same day: I found a website of a national group that researches impact fees all over the US - it is at www.ImpactFees.com . They also just issued a 6-page report saying that reducing residential impact fees in FLORIDA had little impact, and the number of building permits still dropped. The study did NOT include Lake County, and it used the analysis period of Jan. 2008 to July, 2009 which was before Lake County approved a waiver of transportation impact fees. The report includes some very interesting tables of results for several counties in Florida. Read the report or download it from HERE.
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