Impact fee committee ponders new study

Unless the Highlands County Board of County Commissioners acted beforehand, a moratorium on impact fees would go away and the fees would automatically be reinstated on July 1.

The impact fees initially went into effect on Jan. 1, 2007 and continued through 2008 and for a half year in 2009, until July 1, 2009, when the moratorium began.

An Impact Fee Review Committee met Monday afternoon to discuss a new Highlands County Impact Fee Study prepared by Duncan Associates in association with James C. Nicholas and Wilbur Smith Associates.

The new study was ordered per county ordinance, which required the board to review an impact fee study every three years, said County Engineer Ramon Gavarrete.

A request for proposals was ordered and Duncan was selected. A contract for $110,000 was then entered into to prepare the study.

The new study compressed many of the 45 land use categories in the Tindale-Oliver and Associates study together into 14 categories.

"We're still not there," said Gavarrete on Tuesday.

Adjustments will still have to be made.

A major focus of the new study was to simplify the land-use categories to get away from having to do studies for every conceivable land use, which to do it right they'd have to study all 45 land uses in Highlands County, the consultants said.

"It's really kind of an impossible task to strive for that degree of accuracy," the consultants said. "We felt it's a different approach, which is the one we're recommending here, which is to take a more general approach for land uses, in other words which is to treat all the retail the same."

They created a retail/commercial category that included 19 of the land use categories in the previous study.

The bottom line when you get to the impact fees themselves (that's summarized on Page 4 of the draft in the executive summary), the consultants said, are the fees that they've updated with the fees that were in the last study (original Tindale-Oliver study); which are the fees adopted by the county commission.

Those fees were adopted at 100 percent, adjusted for inflation in 2008 and 2009 and implemented at a percentage. The fees are broken down by units into Road, School, Parks, Library, Fire, EMS, Law and Jail.

The fees in the new study would, if implemented, all go down with the exception of fees for law enforcement and the jail, which were at zero for non-residential. The new study recommends those fees be applied to non-residential uses as well, the consultant said.

The residential fees would come down about one third at 100 percent and the non-residential fees - many of them would be coming down about two thirds, according to committee Chairman Jack Ritchie.

Even with the addition of law enforcement and jail fees for non-residential it still is an overall decrease in the fees, said Gavarrete.

The committee will, over the next several months, discuss the nuances of the study.

Commissioner Barbara Stewart, who attended the meeting, was asked how she would vote when the impact fee issue came before the commission.

She said she does not like to say how she will vote on most issues unless it is something she is absolutely firm about. A lot depends upon the economy, she said.

"So much can change," she said.

Excluding the Highlands County School Board, for the fiscal year 2006 - 2007, the county collected just more than $2.718 million in impact fees; for fiscal year 2007 - 2008 the county collected just more than $1.634 million; and for fiscal year 2008 - 2009 the county collected $889,941.

No one was available at the school board Tuesday afternoon to include its figures with this report.

Note: Since the committee met with the consultants (Jim Duncan and Clancy Mullens) in a telephone conference call it was difficult to discern which of the two men was speaking. Therefore they were referred to as the consultants.