County Commission Joins School Board to Aid Developers at the Expense of Students
Posted
Dennis Maley
On Thursday, the Manatee County Commission broke out its well-worn rubber stamp to help developers push their Half-Off-Impact-Fees sale across the finish line. The board approved the Manatee School Board’s ill-conceived recommendation to require only 50 percent of the fees that were recommended in a recent taxpayer-funded study, following six years of collecting no fees at all.
One after another, a majority of commissioners feigned subordination on the issue, calling it the purview of the school district’s expertise while professing a reluctance to second-guess a recommendation made by a government body that they said should possess the greater knowledge of its budgetary needs.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the meeting was the woeful lack of preparation on behalf of the board. Few commissioners seemed to have any real grasp of the issue or its history, and the amount of basic questions that had to be asked (and often re-asked) of staff from the dais was troublesome given the gravity of the issue, as were the number of inaccurate statements.
Is it too much to ask for our very-well compensated commissioners to come into such a crucial vote having more than a layman’s understanding of the underlying issues and the profound consequences they can have? Apparently so.
First, a little history lesson. The school board recommended in 2009, amid an economic downturn and after having finished a wave of new school construction, that school impact fees be suspended for one year. That recommendation came with a warning from then-Superintendent Tim McGonegal that suspending the fees for any longer could imperil the district’s ability to meet capital needs when the economy recovered.
Despite that recommendation from those who supposedly had the expertise, the county commission instead voted for a two-year suspension of school impact fees. They were able to do that because the county commission sets school impact fees, not the school board. It’s no coincidence that the contradicting positions, in both instances, favored the wishes of local developers. For more on why, simply check any of the campaign finance reports of the commissioners who supported rubber stamping the school board’s recommendation.
The county also halved other impact fees for developers over the same two-year period. Around the same time that two-year moratorium on school impact fees and reduction of other impact fees expired, the county did an impact fee study, inexplicably excluding an examination of the need for school impact fees. Both of the bodies then used the absence of a current study as the reason to repeatedly extend the moratorium on school impact fees each year since.
Let me reiterate. The county was warned that anything more than a one-year hiatus could be fiscally imprudent, passed a two-year hiatus anyway, and then studied the need for impact fees for everything but schools and told the public that its hands were tied on re-implementing them because a current study didn’t exist.
To add insult to injury, the need for a new study in order to re-implement the fees was nothing more than an oft-repeated fabrication. State law only requires that the "best and most recent“ data is used when calculating impact fees and does not prescribe how current that data must be.
Had the county re-implemented the fees at their 2009 levels and developers brought suit, they would have had to have proven that the fees being levied were unjustified. The county could have simply updated their study, which would have demonstrated–as the current study does–that the 2009 fees are still appropriate, since the new amount prescribed in the study is nearly identical to what we were collecting then.
Over six years, by suspending school impact fees, not including schools in the last impact fee study and then feigning an inability to re-institute them, the county commission has declined to collect around $60 million in fees–or the approximate cost of a new middle school the district says it needs to build in the northeast corridor to accommodate all of the growth that has occurred over that time. The county commission clearly owns this failure to taxpayers, students and teachers every bit as much as the school board does.
Yet on Thursday, Commissioners Benac, Baugh, Whitmore and Bustle repeatedly said that it wasn’t their job to second guess the experts, while Commissioner Chappie went along with them silently. "We’re not a higher power,“ Commissioner Whitmore said on multiple occasions, except that when it comes to impact fees, they are exactly that–the school board recommends, but the county commission ultimately decides. If that doesn’t give them the ultimate authority, what would?
This pretzel logic used by both boards creates a perfect circle in which the school board tells outraged citizens, Hey, remember we’re only making a recommendation, impact fees are up to the county commission; and then the county commission in turn tells the same outraged citizens that their beef is really with the school board for passing a recommendation that they themselves are in no position to disagree with.
Too much of Thursday’s discussion got bogged down over the referendum that the school board unwisely tied to their recommendation, which was that if a planned referendum on extending the optional half-cent sales tax for another 15 years failed this November, they would recommend that the fees be reconsidered at 100 percent. If it passed, their recommendation would stay at 50 percent indefinitely.
All of that is pretty much meaningless, because their recommendation is just that. Say it with me one more time: the county commission sets all impact fees. The bottom line was that if the county commission wanted to, it could have simply voted on Thursday to adopt impact fees at 100 percent of the study’s recommendation as the real experts–TischlerBise– said it should. It didn’t.
Of the combined 12 members of the school board and county commission, only County Commissioners Robin DiSabatino and Charles Smith stood up for the children and voted against this injustice.
DiSabatino gave a clear and articulate argument that the money to build schools was clearly needed, as demonstrated in the study, and that someone would be paying for them. If it were not the buyers and builders of each new home that goes up, it would simply fall on other taxpayers to further subsidize the costs created by each "new rooftop.“
Smith, whose district 2 includes the most blighted and economically depressed areas of the county, passionately argued that the 50 percent implementation was all the ammunition that would be needed to defeat the proposed referendum. "It’s hard for me when I have constituents that don’t even have sidewalks–they’re walking to school on dirt–and we’re going to tell them that developers are only going to have to have to pay half of the fees they paid in 2009? I won’t be a part of that,“ he said.
Smith promised that if the resolution passed the county commission as recommended by the school board, he would not support the referendum when it came to the ballot in November. "I agree that it’s not our job to tell the school board how to set their budget,“ said Smith, "but if they’re only going to ask the developers for half of the fees, I can’t support further taxing our citizens. I can’t do that.“
Smith also predicted that it would be a moot issue. "The referendum won’t pass, I mean you can try it,“ he said, looking out to several board members who were in the audience, "but it won’t pass (if developer fees are 50 percent), it won’t.“
Despite being the newest member on the board, Commissioner Smith seemed to get what no one else did. The school board’s plan to raise the money through other means is the county’s business. If the commission approved a reduced impact fee and that decision drove citizens to vote against an extension of the sales tax, the schools would be left in the lurch, and going back to developers for the rest of the impact fees then wouldn’t come close to covering their needs. That’s not only a school board problem.
Commissioner Benac argued that the school district had acknowledged that school impact fees, whether collected at 50 or 100 percent, weren’t going to amount to enough funds to meet their needs, which was why they were focused on the sales tax. She’s right only in that the former couldn’t pay the freight without help from the latter, but Commissioner Smith’s point that the latter could prevent the former seemed lost on her.
Commissioners Bustle and Baugh reiterated that they weren’t sure they’d support the half-cent sales tax either, but didn’t think it had anything to do with their vote on impact fees. Unfortunately for taxpayers, they could not have been more incorrect.
Understand, the sales tax will bring in around $23-25 million dollars in annual revenue, which is about double what 100 percent impact fees were estimated to bring in (about $12 million annually). So yes, the $6 million a year being left in developers’ pockets at 50 percent would take about a decade to amount to a middle school and nearly twice that for the high school the district said it also needs.
However, if not collecting $6 million a year angers the taxpayers into not passing the sales tax, as Smith argued would be the case, going back for the other half of the impact fees won’t be of much help either.
Furthermore, according to the school district, even the sales tax and 50 percent of the impact fees will not cover the school district’s projected costs to fund even the status quo.
District officials have said publicly that they would not only need voters to approve a sales tax, but around $150 million in additional bond debt, while also voting to voluntarily raise their school property taxes above the maximum millage rate the district can levy. Those two measures would also require public approval. How can they possibly afford to leave $6 million a year on the table?
The school board outwardly acknowledged during the meeting in which they unanimously passed their resolution approving the recommendation of 50 percent school impact fees that they expect developers, after receiving the discount, to help them promote and pass the referendum.
This suggests what school board candidate Linda Schaich called a "backroom deal“ during public comments at Thursday’s meeting, in which developers likely promised to fund a political action committee supporting the referendum, possibly against the threat of either backing other candidates or working against the sales tax if they didn’t get their way.
That’s the center of the circle folks. Apparently, the school board doesn’t decide school impact fees, nor does the county commission–the developers do.
Except that when the referendum fails, even after all of the robo-calls and glossy direct mail pieces urging citizens to do it for the children and stand behind teachers to support public education in our community, after all of the "fiscal cliff“ warnings from school board members and six-figure administrators, it won’t be the developers who citizens are angry with–and it won’t just be the school board.
They’ll remember that the county commission had the final say and–except for Commissioners Smith and DiSabatino–were either too inept to understand the stakes, or simply did as they were told by the developers who keep them in office.
The county commission should know all too well the danger of the game that is being played. When it tried to ram a half-cent sales tax past voters that amounted to a giant giveaway to private-sector companies that own our local hospitals, the BOCC also had the help of a political action committee funded by those special interests, and tried to dupe the taxpayers into thinking they were voting on shifting the burden from property taxes to sales taxes, but it still failed miserably.
Voters, turned it away nearly 2-1. They were understandably angry at the misleading presentation, and the board’s refusal to study more efficient ways to deliver indigent care. In addition, nearly $300,000 in taxpayer money was spent conducting a summertime, off-year, special election in order to keep it off of the high-turnout Presidential election ballot just months prior, leaving the legitimate programs who relied on the funding in a desperate state, the same way our poorest performing schools will be.
If Thursday’s public comments are any indication, voters from Tea Party to Progressive will be lined up to show the same disdain for this boondoggle, especially considering that taxpayers had to fund the expensive impact fee study that both the school board and county commission have now completely ignored.
The public's position seems to be one of: If you don’t need the developers’ money, don’t ask for mine. I suppose the problem is that the commissioners and school board members fear the developers much more than the voters. Hopefully that will finally change come November.
Dennis
Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column
appears each Thursday and Sunday. Dennis' debut novel, A Long Road Home,
was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy.
