School District to Vote on Reduced Impact Fees at Tonight's Meeting

BRADENTON – Despite saying it would delay a vote on whether or not to reintroduce school impact fees on new residential construction until December, the Manatee County School District is set to vote on a fee schedule that would only gradually reintroduce the fees, which have been suspended since 2009, over the next three years.

Citing a lack of an impact fee study–yet failing to explain why the study had not been done–the school board and county commission have continuously voted to extend what the district had originally recommended as a one-year suspension of collecting the fees back in 2009.

This year, the district partnered with the county to produce a study, which prescribes fees of over $6,000 per new home. The school board voted to delay a scheduled vote at their last meeting two weeks ago, after politically-connected developer Pat Neal pushed back against re-implementing the fees at the meeting, saying it wanted more time to hear from the public and developers, who have banked more than $60 million in additional profits since the fees were suspended.

The school district claims it will need to build at least three more schools in the rapidly-developing northeast corridor of the county, including one high school in the Parrish/Ellenton area, where development has been most intense in recent years and no high school currently exists.

The district said last year that it plans to ask the public for upward of a billion dollars in additional debt and tax revenues, much of which it says will go toward the construction and upgrade of new facilities to deal with growth. Many citizens have criticized the district and school board for asking the public for additional money, while developers have not had to pay impact fees for several years.

Because Florida does not have a state income tax, which limits the amount of capital funding sources for school districts, the state allows communities to collect impact fees for things like schools, buses, roads, parks and libraries on each new property in order to make sure that growth is helping to pay for itself.

The proposed resolution the board will take up at tonight's meeting calls for collecting only half of the amount of impact fees called for in the study during the first year. In the second year, the amount would be raised to 75 percent and in the third, the county would finally collect the amount that the study claims it currently needs.