School Board Sides With Developers Over Kids

On Tuesday night, the Manatee County School Board voted not to recommend that the county commission implement the school impact fee prescribed in a long-delayed study. Why? Because the politically-connected developers seated in the front row didn’t want them to. Instead, the board will look to taxpayers to make up the difference. If citizens balk–as they should–our students will pay the price.

The fees, which are paid by developers on new residential housing units, help to support the need for new schools that is created through new development. The county has not been collecting them since 2009, despite the need for multiple new schools in the northeast corridor where the bulk of development has been occurring.

For the last two years, both the county and school board have been using the absence of a current study as an excuse to continue an irresponsible moratorium that was originally supposed to be just two years, got stretched to three and then went unaddressed for three more. It has often been misstated that it would have been against state law to re-implement the fees without a new study. However, statute only requires that the best and most recent data be used.

Developers in other counties have challenged fees when accurate data does not exist and can be successful if they are proven too high or otherwise unnecessary. But had the county re-implemented the fees at their previous level once the obvious need for new schools presented itself, it could have collected them while a study was being performed, confident that the obvious need would be validated. Indeed, the study presented last month revealed a need for impact fees at nearly the exact same level as when they were suspended in 2009.

More telling is the fact that neither the county nor the school district have made efforts to explain why school impact fees were not included in the 2011 impact fee study the county commissioned, despite the fact that the moratorium was set to expire and the previous school impact fee study had been done way back in 2004. That inaction leads a cynic like me to believe that schools weren’t included precisely so that the absence of a study could be used to defend an otherwise indefensible moratorium.

A logical person could be forgiven were they to think that the new study meant the jig was up; that finally, after having their new development subsidized by taxpayers for six long years, developers would begin to pay their fair share after pocketing around $60 million through the moratorium over that time. With the study in hand, both the county and the school district would have lost its long-abused excuse on why developers were getting a free ride. But a logical person has no place in Manatee County politics.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the board voted to recommend that the county commission implement only 50 percent of the school impact fees recommended in the study. The resolution stipulates that if voters support a 15-year extension of the half cent sales tax next November, the fees will remain at 50 percent. If not, they would go up to 75 percent of the recommended fees in the second year, and the county would finally begin collecting the full fee their consultants say is needed now in the third year–nearly a decade after they were suspended.

The district has lost about $60 million during the moratorium–or about the cost of a middle school it says it needs to service new growth. On Tuesday night, a thinly-veiled bargain began to emerge. The school district would continue to pad the bottom line of developers and the developers would help them sell the sales tax–a much bigger part of the funding pie at about $5-1 on impact fees.

The problem that no one seemed to envision was that taxpayers will likely see the board’s action as a big reason not to vote for the new taxes–yes, plural–as the district also says it plans to ask taxpayers to voluntarily raise their school property tax millage rate and approve more than a hundred million dollars in new bond debt for É you guessed it, new school construction. As these taxes will likely be seen as further subsidies for developers, voting against them will give taxpayers their only chance to vent that frustration.

The school board’s plan seems like bad strategy, based on poor logic, fueled by an abundance of political cowardice. Oh, and throw in a healthy dose of ignorance as the endless board discussion on impact fees at Tuesday’s meeting painfully demonstrated how little the board members and administrators understand the fees É or economics in general.



Since joining the school board in 2006, board chair Bob Gause has gone from a middle-class landscaper to a well-connected "consultant“ in the development trade, seeing his personal wealth increase through business ties with companies he’s helped get lucrative contracts for. Clearly, it wouldn’t be a good move for him personally to go against the Manatee County development community, and nothing in Gause’s record as a board member suggests that he’d put what was best for the students of our county ahead of his own personal agenda. Another vote in the bag.

Dave Miner gave a number of his typically long-winded soliloquies in which he pondered what "doing the right thing for our students“ meant. There were a few moments when it even seemed like the self-proclaimed watchdog would go against the political wind and stand up for the students against the developers. But in the end, Miner, who will be facing a very difficult re-election campaign in 2016, had nothing more than empty platitudes for the kids and went along with the crowd.

Miner tried to make a passionate case that supporting our superintendent and voting to recommend the discounted plan was somehow courageous even if it brings "political heat," but there were in fact no opportunities for political courage on Tuesday night. Political courage was needed three years ago and every point between when superintendents and school boards sat on their hands and rubber-stamped the absurd moratorium time and again. On Tuesday, there was simply the opportunity to exercise common sense and finally allow a moratorium that has lasted three times its original length to do what it was supposedly designed to do–expire!

First-term board member Charlie Kennedy asked the most questions, and as is often the case, came to the meeting having done the most homework. Kennedy, who has struggled to be the compromise member of the board, again tried to find a middle ground. He couldn’t, because when an organization is trying to do anything other than the one and only obvious and equitable solution–and a half a decade too late at that–no middle ground exists. Everything other than the obvious becomes the absurd. As usual, Kennedy spoke much only to go along with the crowd in the end.

That left only Karen Carpenter, who has long been the sane voice on a board that’s too often found sanity in short supply. In many instances, Carpenter has cast an important protest vote in lone dissent of a board majority that too often sided with special interests and a clique of well-connected administrators to defend the indefensible. Not this time. Ms. Carpenter seemed uncomfortable with making any decision at all and pushed at both the last meeting and this one to delay the action, but never managed to give any indication that she would go against the wishes of Mr. Neal and Mr. Beruff.

That was the backroom deal that had apparently been cut. The developers would come up and laughably argue against paying any impact fees at all, giving the old Chicken Little story about the economic Armageddon that would ensue were they to pay their share, Superintendent Diana Greene would offer a "compromise" solution of instead using a graduated re-introduction of fees, and after endless hemming and hawing and feigned soul searching, Dr. Greene and the board would try and sell the half-measure as a good deal.

In exchange, it seemed developers were expected to run one of their notorious PAC campaigns, this time promoting the tax referendums, because if they passed, they would be assured that their impact fees would remain at half the prescribed rate. I guess that’s the political savvy Ms. Carpenter was referring to, as Neal and Beruff managed to pull off the oldest negotiation trick in the book: asking for twice what you expect and then acting like getting only 100 percent of it is meeting in the middle.

Dr. Greene and the school board had now better hope that the snake oil they bought cures the district’s many ailments. If the plan to help developers backfires and voters turn away the referendums next November, the district will find itself up creek without the proverbial paddle. They’ll be counting on telling taxpayers that if they don’t pick up the tab for the district’s financial mismanagement, even the C-rated, bottom-half-of-the-state education they provide now will no longer be within reach.

Will cash-strapped taxpayers blink first, or tell the district that it should have thought of that before it will have turned away around $70 million from developers? I’d point to the county’s efforts to benefit deep-pocketed, politically-connected health care providers by paying to replenish a mismanaged corpus with tax money in order to support a bloated and inefficient indigent care program. Sure, the hospitals and its doctors who profited from the status quo spent hundreds of thousand of dollars in PAC money to misrepresent the referendum and confuse voters into thinking they were voting to lower their own property taxes, but all of those glossy direct mail pieces and radio ads didn’t stop voters from turning it away nearly 2-1 at the polls.

I don’t imagine taxpayers will be any more sympathetic to publicly subsidizing highly-profitable commercial interests this time around, especially considering that the school district was already facing an uphill battle to pass those measures before it became yet another rubber stamp for big development in Manatee County government.