Flagler County Commissioner Leann Pennington is hoping county government will rethink the special tax Daytona North–also known as the Mondex–residents have been paying since the 1980s for road maintenance, either to scrap it altogether or to better define its purpose, and lay out specifically what benefits residents get out of it.
Pennington doesn’t think Daytona North should be paying a special assessment–not when its property owners already pay their normal share of property taxes, which should grant them the right to services–all services–just like anyone else in the county. The County Commission and the administration have seen it differently for decades. If anything, County Administrator Heidi Petito last year sought to double the special assessment: it hasn’t been raised in 31 years, and inflation has reduced its value.
The commission, led by Pennington, pushed back against that proposal. Now Pennington wants to go further. She won this much from her colleagues: the administration will provide a more thorough analysis of the assessment, the number of people who pay it and who benefit from it, the miles of roads it maintains now as opposed to when it was first enacted, and what residents may expect if the assessment were removed or altered. That direction was distilled from a lengthy commission discussion about the special tax at a workshop on Monday.
None of those standards have been specified. Over the years, the assessment has only gotten more complicated and intractable. “It’s a dangerous special assessment,” Pennington said. “I don’t think it rises to the level any longer of of what the statutes say. I think we need to tear it apart and figure out, should they really be paying for stormwater in their special assessment? should they really be paying for evacuation roads in their special assessments? Should they be paying for parks? Should they be paying for dead animals to be picked up?” She does not think the special assessment revenue should be applied to basic services like road maintenance and stormwater, which benefit all county residents.
“Simply put,” Commissioner Greg Hansen said, summing up Pennington’s argument, “from the residents out there, what are they getting for the special assessment? And they don’t know. They don’t know.” Nor does the public at large. Nor, apparently, do commissioners, based on Monday’s discussion.
“Where is the benefit for their ad valorem? What is it covering for their services in general for this this community,” Pennington asked, meaning what are Daytona North property owners getting in exchange for paying property taxes, as they do like everyone else. “I just have a hard time penalizing that community if we’re not seeing where they’re getting the benefit of general services. And where do you cut off general services? Where do you say: Hey, your ad valorem goes to this general service, and this is the level above general service that rises to a special assessment.”
Daytona North is an unusual subdivision, and not just because it attracts some of the more eccentric characters in this corner of the galaxy. They like to keep themselves as remote from the grid as possible. But they also want services.
The original developer of Daytona North had snubbed county regulations. There was a lawsuit. The court ruled in 1977 that the county had no obligation to provide services to Daytona North, whether drainage, roads or parks. But that doesn’t mean the county doesn’t, in fact, have jurisdiction there. (County Attorney Al Hadeed in a 2009 memo to then-Commissioner Bob Abbott explained the assessment.)
“Over time we have exercised dominion over these roadways,” Assistant County Attorney Sean Moylan said. “We set the speed limit, we put up traffic signage, we maintain the roads. When we get grants, we pave them. We include them in our gas tax miles when we do the formula for our revenue. So if that’s not ownership, I’m not sure what is. But it’s not a traditional type of ownership.”
The county enacted a special assessment, or a special tax, in the 1980s, to provide some services. Residents pay 58 cents per foot of property that abuts the road. That 58 cents hasn’t changed since 1993. If it had kept up with inflation, the levy would have to be $1.27 per foot. Put another way, its value today is 27 cents in 1993 purchasing power.
Costs have gone up. The service district had budgeted revenue of $260,000 each of the last four years, with a budgeted appropriation of $310,000 this year. That doesn’t buy much.
That’s one of the problems: what is “much”? The enactment of the special tax did not specify what level of service would be provided. “It’s changed several times. Initially when it was created it was supposed to pay for not just the roads but it could also be used for parks out there,” County Administrator Heidi Petito said, though even she had difficulties nailing down the scope of the assessment. No one seemed to have its controlling document at hand.
“I know the county built a park, it could be used for the maintenance and upkeep of the park,” Petito said. “I think it’s written into either an ordinance or something the county had passed. There had been a discussion over the years where they would take that front foot assessment and they would split it up holding half to be used to pave the roads out there and the other half would go towards the maintenance. We used to have town hall meetings out there to talk about level of service.”
In 1982, before Daytona North’s special assessment was enacted, the state Attorney General issued an opinion in answer to a question by the Marion County Commission. The question was: May Marion County levy a special assessments either instead of or in addition to property taxes to fund county services, including the property appraiser’s office, county jail and tax collector’s office? The answer was no.
Pennington quoted from the opinion: “The power to make special assessments can be exercised only for special improvements, it cannot be exercised to burden particular property and the owners thereof with the cost of general and governmental benefits and expenditures.” She then quoted a state law (seemingly from a “report” she cited by Ashley Moody, the state attorney general), that the special assessment must “provide a benefit which is different in type or degree from benefits provided to the community as a whole.
“So what is different about stormwater? What is different about animal pickup? What is different about emergency evacuation, roadway paving, what is different that about their special assessment?” Pennington said, now that the county has applied for grants that could be spent on such services–in Daytona North as well as anywhere else? She said the county must re-define what is and is not a public benefit. The cost of services will no change. “But we can’t penalize that area based on their consumption and their need for maintaining the roads based on a lawsuit that said, well, you don’t assume ownership of it when we clearly are starting to look like we assume more ownership” by applying for grants, Pennington said.
Commissioner Donald O’Brien was interested in knowing traffic counts for the roads, to have a clearer picture of usage there, compared with the rest of the county. To him, there may be an inequitable distribution of dollars in the other direction: why spend money on roads that have “far less population than the rest of the county,” he said, and “how are we not allocating more dollars to county roads, the major roads that have much higher traffic counts and benefit more of the county taxpayers overall?”
He agreed with Pennington, however, that “lower valued communities” that pay less taxes overall cannot be penalized.
Another complication: Several miles in Daytona North have been paved since the assessment went into effect. That makes them county roads. Those roads should be subtracted from the assessment, Commission Chairman Andy Dance said, since the original special taxing district was based on the number of road miles when the county took on that responsibility. “So there could be an adjustment in my opinion based on the amount of roads we’ve reduced and applied [Small County Road Assistance Program] money and thus claimed ownership of those as county roads,” he said. the Small County Road Assistance Program known as Scrap is a state Department of Transportation grant program helping small counties to resurface and rebuild their county roads. Dance also thinks the county should “clean up” the special assessment and its purpose to have a clearer idea of what its revenue may be spent on.
“I think it’s legal,” Moylan, the assistant county attorney, said of the assessment. “The question is, is it wise and that’s that’s for you to determine.”
Pennington had asked for legal guidance as far as what the benefit of the assessment might be. Moylan demurred. “Legal can’t tell you what the benefit is. Ms. Petito can’t tell you under the law. It’s a finding you have to make when you adopt the assessment,” Moylan said. “It is a decision of the county commission as a whole and not the staff or the county attorney’s office,” though the administration can help with information.
That information will be forthcoming.
Daytona North Final Judgment 1977
