County’s Approval of Flagler Schools’ Impact Fee Increase Again Delayed, and Patience Wears Thin

It’s been anything but, with county commissioners and the Flagler Home Builders Association staunchly opposing the increase, forcing negotiations and, after successive delays, causing the School Board last week to approved a significantly scaled back impact fee schedule. The County Commission on Monday was expected to ratify the decision.

It did not, as County Administrator Heidi Petito requested that the item be pulled from the agenda and delayed another month: more work was required in the mutual agreement between the county and the district (technically referred to as an “interlocal agreement”) involving a form of credit. Administratively, the two sides still have differences to work out. The extension left one commissioner uneasy.

Andy Dance said he “wanted to make sure that the superintendent was aware of the tabling,” and that she was on board with further discussions. The superintendent, Petito said, had been out of town but the two had exchanged texts, scheduling a meeting for this coming Friday between staffers to “begin these discussions.”




“For a lot of people patience is running thin on this, the continuing of these extensions,” Dance said. He was a School Board member for a dozen years until last year. “I know there’s been progress, otherwise we wouldn’t have put it on the agenda,” he continued. “But all parties need to get together and solve this issue so that we can move on, and for the benefit of the entire community.”

The School Board initially sought to double its impact fees, the one-time levy on new residential construction. The levy revenue is intended to defray the cost of new homes’ “impact” on school enrollment: the more homes, the more students, the more space in school will be needed. The district is projecting growth enough that it will need a new middle school and a new high school, plus a substantial expansion of Matanzas High School, in the next several years. The home builders association argues that while growth is indisputable, it has not followed that the growth is being driven by families with children.

The builders have facts on their side: Flagler County’s population has been growing year after year for a decade and a half, but its school-age population, as reflected in school enrollment, has remained flat, at around 12,500, give or take a few hundred students, for just as long. Census figures show that the growth has been disproportionately among people who no longer have children in school.

The one-time school impact fee on a residential home, first imposed in 2005 (the district had no impact fees before that) is today what it’s been since 2005: $3,600. If the impact fee was increased merely to keep up with inflation, it would have had to be $5,182 today. In August, the School Board voted to increase it to $7,175, accounting for the substantially higher cost of building schools. Home builders howled. County commissioners, two of whom are running for reelection (and seeking home builders’ endorsement) refused to approve the increase.




Last week the school board retreated, and set its impact fee for a residential home at $5,450–ironically, close to the amount that the district’s consultant had recommended the fee be set at in 2005. The district conceded, but also approved a system enabling it to raise the fee for every 500 new students certified by enrollment counts once a year. That gave it breathing room for the future, and appeared to have settled the issue with the builders and the commission.

Mitigation credits are an additional wrinkle. They apply when, for example, a particular development is age-restricted. Take the future Eagle Lakes development off Old Kings Road South, now called Radiant: Just as businesses do not pay school impact fees, since Walmart, Target and Pet Smart have no children they send to school, a residential development age-restricted to those 55 and over should not pay impact fees, builders argue. (The argument is logical in the main, but in a Modern Family-era, when numerous grandparents care for their grandchildren, the argument can weaken.) Radiant will total 1,200 homes, but 760 of those homes will be age-restricted, and therefore theoretically eligible for mitigation credits.

But the details of such arrangements can be problematic: why would an age-restricted community be exempt from the fee when innumerable single-family homes are paying the fee, only to have tenants who are in the same demographic as an age-restricted community? The answer to the question is pending, and is at the center of the discussions expected between the district and the county. The commission’s vote is now scheduled for the March 21 meeting.




Even with the approval, the school board made another big concession to developers: the new schedule of impact fees, which also applies to mobile homes and apartments (at different rates), will not kick in until September 1, almost a year after the School Board had hoped, last August, its new fees would start generating revenue. The difference can be measured in millions.

It isn’t likely that the halls of the district’s top administration, which share the same third floor as those of the county administration at the Government Services Building, are reverberating cheer for their downhall neighbors. It’s not just in Flagler, with lawmakers bearing down on school boards’ and teachers’ autonomy across Florida, schools might feel like they have a lot in common with Rodney Dangerfield these days.