Vote for candidates who support impact fees
Editor, The Sun:
Dear fellow Wakullans,
I am a graduate student at FSU, and my husband is a park ranger at Wakulla Springs. Over the years, we have been saddened to watch the effects of irresponsible development on our beautiful county. While studying our local issues, I have come to understand the importance of impact fees. Impact fees are placed on new development to offset the cost of new infrastructure on current residents. The county has not collected these fees for ten years, and this is part of the reason our taxes keep going up. At The Wakulla Sun Candidate Forum, John Quinton and Sam McGrew were the only candidates who pledged to reinstate impact fees. Some points worth emphasizing are:
• An impact fee study is money well spent. Wakulla brought in $1.4 million in impact fees in 2008 alone. A study is required to reinstate impact fees, which costs about $50,000–$100,000 – a drop in the bucket when compared with the revenue we are losing.
• The Florida Impact Fee Statute is concise and is easy to find online. It gives counties a lot of freedom to set their own parameters. There are no special limitations on rural counties, as some have claimed.
• Every impact fee has a purpose, like library expansion. $58,000 of earmarked funds are going unspent in Wakulla County. This money can only be used for library expansion, but it’s not enough. If we had collected impact fees for the past decade we could have completed this expansion or invested in parks and better infrastructure. A well-designed impact fee study and implementation result in transparent ways for builders to calculate costs. They are a good way to responsibly manage growth and help counties pay for EMS, roads, wastewater management, and parks. Most importantly, they protect current residents from subsidizing infrastructure for developers.
Our county has missed the chance to collect millions of dollars in the past ten years, funding we should have had to keep our tax burden low and our county services supported. John Quinton and Sam McGrew want to change that. Please consider this when you vote Nov. 8th.
Sincerely,
Emily Johnson, Crawfordville