- April 18, 2024
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At a commission meeting last week, County Commissioner Andy Dance proposed a compromise that led the County Commission to approve a school impact fee increase after months of back and forth with the school district.
"I look forward to having those further discussions, so we can kind of put that issue behind us, galvanize around a new agreement there and move forward."
— ANDY DANCE, county commissioner
On Flagler Broadcasting's "Free For All Friday" program on March 25, Dance credited the school district for adjusting the proposed impact fee to tie it to actual student population counts.
"I think what sold it [to the County Commission] is that the district was creative enough to look at escalation clauses," Dance said. "So it's kind of a performance-based ordinance: If the district grows by 500 students, they get an additional $500 added to it."
School district impact fee increases, under state law, require the approval of the local County Commission.
The escalation clause in the district's impact fee increase ordinance helped win the support of Flagler County commissioners who'd been wary of the student population projections the school district had been using when it had, last August, proposed much steeper impact fee increases than the ones the commission ultimately approved at a meeting on March 21.
Initially, impact fees will still rise considerably from where they are now: For single family homes, the increase will be from the current $3,600 to $5,450, while impact fees for multi-family homes will rise from $931 to $1,360, and fees for mobile homes will rise from $1,066 to $2,150.
The fact that more students will have to appear in schools before impact fees rise above those numbers, however, helped gain the support of commissioners who didn't want to make builders pay to fund school capacity expansions that might not actually be needed.
Commissioners debated the impact fee ordinance at length before voting unanimously in favor of the impact fee increase, after Dance proposed that the commission approve the proposed fee increase, but also look into the possibility of adjusting another school funding mechanism, called "proportionate share mitigation," that also draws money from builders.
"I look forward to having those further discussions, so we can kind of put that issue behind us, galvanize around a new agreement there and move forward," Dance said.
School quality, and therefore school impact fees, also impact other county priorities such as economic development, Dance said.
"Without a good school system, we're not going to attract additional economic development," Dance said.
