Tavares, FL - Dec. 12, 2011 -
Will tomorrow’s offsite Lake County Board meeting at Camp Challenge result in approving support for $500-700-million in new and continued taxes for roads without verifying the validity of the $700-million spending target calculated by staff???
Will they receive SHOCKING reality of five years of future budgets?
Will they only listen to, or actually decide to pursue a radical new taxing method being pushed for roads to offset impact fees – it is called mobility fees.
Will new Board Chair Leslie Campione implement
We will have spies at the Tavares Admin building to see who does NOT read this and goes to the wrong location. The agenda was not posted until late last week and the offsite location was NOT disclosed in the agenda (they never insert the location at the top of the agenda, although we have constantly asked for that improvement.)
And, the agenda gave no address for Camp Challenge, and to prevent you from going to the Camp Challenger in California, WE PROVIDE the correct Lake County location EAST of Mount Dora HERE:
31600 Camp Challenge Road Sorrento, FL 32776 - 352-383-4711
Here is the link to the agenda:
http://www.lakecountyfl.gov/board_agendas/bcc_automated/121311.html
As always, workshops offsite are usually designed to discuss issues the Board or staff doesn’t want you to know much about. Additionally, this may be the last Board meeting until the second week of January.
As a consequence, only one of the FIVE tabbed items on the agenda actually had an attachment with some details: Tab 1
First, however, the agenda does not show they will allow public input. This practice is unacceptable, and new Chairperson Leslie Campione needs to unravel prior restrictions on public input and allow it at ALL meetings and for each agenda item like the Lake County Schools do.
This is a “workshop”, which usually means no official votes will take place, but you never know.
Here is my review of the issues by tab number:
Tab 1: Business Opportunity Centers: Approval of agreement with Lake Sumter Community College for the operation of Business Opportunity centers and BCC for fiscal impact of $102,000.
This is pretty much a done deal and was discussed at a prior meeting, when it was a surprise to me. Basically, instead of affiliating with the UCF aggressive incubator programs like the one in Leesburg, it seems the Lake County Board is turning over operation of what was once called incubators to now be “Business Opportunity Centers” which are offices using training programs and guidance from LSCC. The UCF programs are very aggressive and emphasize creation and support for GROWTH oriented firms that probably would seek growth funds from angels and later venture capital firms.
However, I called Scott Blankenship, head of Economic Development at the County and he explained the plan was much more complex and combined both incubator concepts with basic business skills training like that provided by LSCC
Read Wikipedia HERE about Business incubators.
HERE is the UCF Business Incubation Program site
True incubators focusing on high growth are better, but maybe Lake County is not ready yet, and an “office suite” type of facility is right for us. True entrepreneurs focused on growth and needing an incubator should probably commute to Orlando and join one of the UCF incubators
In conclusion, the County ED program keeps moving this ahead, and plans to open a “Business Opportunity Center” in both Groveland (apparently Clermont is dead as a location) and Eustis, plus they are seeking full time support from the Small Business Development Program (click here) funded by the Federal Small Business Administration . It’s all good, and this is a good step in providing the infrastructure for business formation in Lake County. (PS: The actual agreement with LSCC is attached to the agenda tab item, and it contains more conditions for performance by the LSCC center, which is also good.)
Tab 2: Budget Discussion – There are no attachments, but we know that the County manager plans to present the FIRST five year budget plan to the Board, which is an event itself. Due to the expected budget shortfalls for the next fiscal year, this is the first of many meetings to revise the future 2012/2013 budget to reflect future funding realities. This presentation should be a good overview of how staff sees where future budgets will go. We wonder whether they will also show how much the Sheriff should cut his budget again to reflect budget realities.
Tab 3: Recommendations from the Capital Facilities Advisory Committee (CFAC) regarding future funding for Lake County roads for the next 20 years. No attachments furnished. This report was given to the Board at an earlier meeting, and it basically said that over the next 20+ years, there will be a need to fund $700-million in new road projects plus maintenance of roads. However, I attended the many meetings of the CFAC committee and they never reviewed the accuracy of the $700-million funding “target”, but focused on finding revenues to fund those projects. The report lists numerous funding sources, including new ones like a 5 cent per gallon of GAS (not diesel) tax, or cutting the School Districts out of 1/3 of an existing sales tax which is coming up for renewals. They also included impact fee recommendations, but diluted them by including a condition where unemployment must be down to 4% before 100% of the impact fees could be calculated. Thus, essentially, the impact fees will be greatly reduced over future years unless unemployment drops.
My question is, should we accept the $700-million spending “Target” mentioned in the report as being valid? It is based upon Public Works and MPO figures and objectives, and was NOT reviewed for validity by the Committee. Or should the Board have an objective consultant to review it to see if the spending target should really be $498-million and not $700-million. Are your elected officials going to accept that spending target and approve all the related future renewable and new taxes in the report, or get an objective verification that the spending target is valid? I think there is some fat in the numbers that in this type of economy should be cut out. Are all the MPO projects valid and actually justified? Are the standards used for calculating road costs by Public Works “nice to have” or are there some projects that could be scaled down?
Tab 4: Mobility Fees - NO attachments or overview was provided in the AGENDA. This is a radical new method of taxing new growth construction to fund roads and other capital infrastructure. Currently, if the waived road impact fees were in place, they tax the same type of construction the same whether it is 1 mile from a school or firestation or if it was 30 miles away. The idea is why should a new housing tract near existing schools and infrastructure pay the same for growth created infrastructure costs like road, schools, fire stations as one that is twenty miles away that probably then forces taxpayers to fund new schools and firestations and roads near them. I actually brought this up at the CFAC meetings because it seemed that if the impact fee was less if you were building new construction near an existing service center, it was less costly for infrastructure than if you created a new tract 30 miles from town centers.
It turns out there is a concept called mobility fees that does this, and Commissioner Sean Parks had an article about it being used in one Florida County. MPO head TJ Fish jumped on it, and I assume he is giving this presentation. So, the idea is to reduce overall infrastructure costs by creating reduced impact fees if you locate near existing service centers vs being 30 miles away. We will see how this works, and it could be a good compromise to still have growth related “impact” fees for new construction, but by having variable rates, they would reward developers with lower rates if they locate new construction near existing service and population centers.
However, one caveat – the use of incentives like this fall right into the Agenda 21 goals, which is to increase costs of small landowners so they are driven to relocate into a “planned” urban population center. I haven’t figured out yet whether the results are good or bad yet from that perspective, but lower taxes are always good.
Tab 5: Proposed Sorrento CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) - CRA’s already exist in Lake County in Umatilla, Mount Dora and perhaps elsewhere. - They are legal entities setup to give future tax growth funds to a separate fund to be spent on renovation of “blighted” areas like downtowns that are run down. This is being championed by County Commissioner Leslie Campione who has set up a meeting in Sorrento and also conducted an online survey and she will bring it up.
My research on CRA’s indicates, however that there are MANY abuses that can occur from different activities. Cities (or a County) behind CRA’s around the US have used the fund as a slush fund for other projects, to buy land from relatives at excessive prices, use eminent domain to takeover small businesses so land could be used for a Walmart, fund new car dealers, etc. I have a huge list of problems with CRA’s around the country, and success depends on local administrators and officials. Florida State government doesn’t audit these guys for performance, compliance, etc so there is no State level oversight (gee, just like no oversight of Hospital Districts, Water Districts, etc.).
At this time, I have no evidence that the planned CRA will not be successful (i.e. “don’t mess with Leslie”), but I will soon publish a large collection of all the problems that CRA’s have elsewhere, and hopefully it will be used as a guide in ensuring no problems impact our local Lake County CRA’s.
Conclusion:
Finally, as always, expect one or more commissioners to bring up something new at the end – we have been told that there might even be a discussion regarding certain “snarky” emails discussed in the Orlando Sentinel. Or, maybe not…
Be there at Camp Challenger at 9am if you want to see all this stuff live – there won’t be a video taken, but an official audio recording will be available later. And, tell new Board Chair Leslie Campione that public input for each agenda item should ALWAYS be allowed at ALL Board meetings.
Vance Jochim
Lake County Fiscal Rangers
Chief Fiscal Watchdog
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Tavares, FL 32778
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