A year ago the Flagler Beach City Commission increased some impact fees and adopted new ones that increased the cost of building a house by $5,000, but also provided the city with needed revenue to defray the impact of new development on the city’s infrastructure, its parks, police, fire and library services, as impact fees are designed to do. The fees target new residents and businesses.
Commissioner Rick Belhumeur was disappointed that the new schedule did not also include a transportation impact fee. He even cast a dissenting vote when his colleagues approved the schedule.
Last week, the commission approved a $140,000 appropriation for a “mobility study,” an essential step before the city can impose a transportation “mobility fee.”
It is no longer called a transportation impact fee, because a “mobility” fee’s purpose is broader than transportation fees. It’s not just about adding lanes and sidewalks anymore, or simply increasing road capacity for cars and trucks. It’s about making even existing roads flow better, or examining parking concepts, or taking account of pedestrians, bicyclists, even water taxis.
Transportation impact fees are typically paid for new or wider roads. A mobility fee may pay for parking structures, “mobility hubs,” shuttles, traffic-calming devices, bike lanes, and other infrastructure designed to improve the quality of transportation, if not life. A key difference between impact fees and mobility fees is that impact fees are based on vehicle miles traveled. Mobility fees are based on person miles traveled, which includes all modes of travel–not just the car.
Palm Beach Gardens-based Nue Urban Concepts will prepare the study, which will include a parking analysis and recommendations as part of its “mobility action plan.” Among other considerations, the study will examine the potential for a parking structure from where the city would provide shuttles, water taxis not excluded. The study will also analyze on-street parking, pricing, restrictions and permitting, dovetailing with the commission’s interest in developing paid parking. (See: “Flagler Beach Gets Its First Glimpse at App-Based Paid Parking, and Guardedly Likes What It Sees.”)
The company presented its proposal to the commission on Feb. 13, including its cost. (See the full presentation here.) Flagler Beach is piggy-backing on a contract Nue Urban Concept signed with Gainesville for a similar study. The contract has a two-year window.
“When we chose the things that we wanted to have in that study,” Belhumeur said of the study that led to the 2024 fees, “nobody thought about roads and impact and mobility. So this is an after-the-fact. We’re just updating what we missed on the last time we had a study on impact fees, because we need roads and sidewalks in a lot of places, and so forth.”
The likely mobility fee schedule is not a mystery: a 2,500-square-foot house would be charged a one-time fee of $2,625. Hotels and motels would pay much more, retail and offices significantly more. In Palm Coast, the builder of a single-family house pays $3,311. Schools, houses of worship, and day care centers pay between $2,400 and $5,400 per 1,000 square feet. Health clubs pay nearly $10,000 per square foot, while hotels and motels pay less than $2,000, fast food restaurants pay $22,000 per square foot, and so on. (See Palm Coast’s full impact fee schedule here.)
The $140,000 appropriation for the study took aback a few residents attending last Thursday’s meeting. “That’s 140 grand. That is mucho dinero en Espanol,” Mark Imhoff of Ocean Palm Drive asked. “I just want to know what that’s for and why we have to be in such a hurry to approve it?”
“Tell me why we need to spend $140,000 to a consultant who doesn’t live here, doesn’t benefit from our products,” another resident said.
Residents were misunderstanding what the fee was for. They thought it was to guide the city in buying new police and fire trucks. “This has absolutely nothing to do with public vehicles,” City Attorney Drew Smith said. “It’s studying the traffic patterns and not just vehicular traffic. This has been the change in the last 10-15, years, is the push for multimodal, and how are cars, vehicles, scooters, bicycles, electric bicycles–how is everything interacting, and then developing a plan for a more efficient interaction, keeping all of those vehicles moving and moving in a safe manner.”
That’s one focus of the mobility study. The second is to determine what mobility fee can or should be levied. It would not be levied on existing residents–at least not directly, though if a resident were to move from an existing home to a new house with a transportation impact fee, that fee would be part of the buying price. As Belhumeur–himself a builder–put it, “not just developers, but people building their personal house as well: their impact fees, you have to pay when you get your permit.”
“The purpose of a local government adopting a mobility fee, just like other impact fees, is so when new development comes to town, new development pays for those impacts,” Smith said. “In this case, it would be on the mobility system of the city, so that the existing taxpayers, the existing businesses aren’t having to fund the improvements necessary to support growth. So it’s an impact fee, not a fee charged to existing residents.” If there is any hurry, it is to ensure that any new development pays its fair share.
State law requires local governments to conduct a study justifying impact fees before levying them. “That’s what that study is all about,” the attorney said. “You can’t bring in those dollars from the development coming in without the impact fee, and you can’t get to the impact fee without a study.”
