County's Consultant Suggests Impact Fees

BRADENTON – At Tuesday's Manatee County Commission work session, members were presented with a preview of a proposed impact fee report, given by Dwayne Pierce Guthrie of TischlerBise, for consideration of a possible return of the fees on new residential development.

The county started charging impact fees for new residential development back in 1986. The idea was to make growth pay for itself. In 2009 the BOCC suspended its school impact fees and a considerable amount of its transportation, utility and park fees, claiming that it would help support the local economy during the Great Recession, though there is no evidence that reducing or suspending the fees stimulates construction.

Despite being several years into a housing market recovery, however, the county never looked to reinstate the fees until last year when it started talking about doing an impact fee study that the county administration said was needed before the board could consider reinstating the fees (state statute says only that the fees must be based on the most recent data from such a study, without defining how recent it must be).

Assistant County Attorney William Clague kicked off the work session by defining to the commission and the audience just what impact fees are and what they should be used for.

During Guthrie's presentation, he said, "The cost is going up, but not as high as the fees were back in 2006." Guthrie produced a detailed study that separated the county into four parts; each slightly different by the amount of miles traveled for services.

Guthrie's proposal includes additional fees for libraries, reinstating administrative charges and transportation fees that include multimodal transportation.

The charts reflected different amounts indexed square feet of the living space or commercial building.

The proposed increases above what impact fees are being charged today–for a three bedroom house–is $15 additional for parks, $319 for libraries, $24 for law enforcement, $17 for public safety, $3,358 for transportation and an additional $149 in admin fees.

Guthrie said over the next 10 years that the county will need 94 additional vehicles/equipment (a 16.2 percent uptick); a new medical wing at the jail (a 72 percent uptick); and an additional Sheriff Department district office (a 16.2 percent uptick).

The county has an inter-local agreement with the school board to move the process forward to the reinstatement of impact fees for schools, and the Manatee Planning Commission is scheduled to review the TischlerBise study on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

The BOCC is scheduled to comment and further review the TischlerBise study on December 3, 2015, but vowed to have a workshop on the subject before then.