At Thursday’s land use meeting, Manatee County Commissioners took their final vote on a massive giveaway to developers and enacted a discounted impact fee schedule that will ensure growth does not have to pay for itself.
Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature have made it harder for communities to charge adequate impact fees to support the infrastructure required by new growth. The current statute (which was amended during the 2021 legislative session) limits increases to impact fees to 50%, which can only be done in four annual increases of 12.5%. Increases of more than 12.5% but less than 25% must be phased in equally over two years.
What’s more, once you raise impact fees, you are locked in without the ability to raise them again for the next four years. Because it used an outdated study, your county commission voted yesterday to phase in a 50% increase over what is being collected now, which is 90% of 2015 costs. Yes, you read that right, and if you would like to take a deeper dive, read this post in County Commissioner George Kruse’s SubStack.
However, for communities like Manatee County, where highways have been choked off by growth driven by developers’ wishes rather than community planning, there is a process by which communities can collect the full amount of impact fees prescribed by a study. First, governments must provide a calculation as to how they arrived at the need for the amount based on “the most recent and localized data,” which Manatee County has already done. They then need to hold at least two publicly-noticed workshops explaining the necessary exceptions to the phase-in limitations. Finally, a super-majority vote (five of seven commissioners) is required.
Kruse, who is up for reelection in August’s primary, has been pushing for the implementation of full impact fees since getting elected to the board in 2020. He has been stymied at every turn by developer-controlled commissioners like Mike Rahn, Jason Bearden, Amanda Ballard, (until recently) James Satcher, and, most of all, Medallion Home CEO Carlos Beruff’s errand boy Kevin Van Ostenbridge.
In other words, there was no chance that the prescribed process for collecting full impact fees was going to happen before the upcoming election. And remember, the board cannot raise impact fees again for the next four years, so the timing of the vote ensures that even if voters elect a new majority this year, our county is going to continue to be underfunded for critical infrastructure, just as it explained to the citizens this summer when presenting a budget that was choc full of scheduled infrastructure projects that had been delayed indefinitely.
Kruse once again explained all of this to his fellow commissioners. Board Chair and developer lickspittle Mike Rahn hemmed and hawed and tried to bend himself into a pretzel to both try and agree with Kruse’s common sense and serve the developers who got him a much-needed job in 2020. Board moron Jason Bearden made a bunch of imbecilic mouth sounds of which no actual sense could be made. Van Ostenbridge, who is challenging Kruse for the countywide D7 seat in the August primary, kept his mouth shut until it was time to make a motion, which he eagerly did.
If you don’t want your beautiful county to continue to descend into a polluted, overdeveloped traffic nightmare just so that filthy rich developers can pad their bottom line, vote these puppets out of office in the August primary. Below are TBT’s endorsements, in which we recommend only grassroots candidates who represent the people, all of whom face developer-sponsored lackeys. If all four win, the madness will end.
Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is available here.
