- April 18, 2024
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The Flagler County government is scrapping its current interlocal agreement with Flagler Schools and will create a new one, county commissioners decided at a May 2 commission meeting.
"We have flexibility in shaping some form of a 'pay and go' system that will provide the school district with funding to offset the cost of constructing future schools without unnecessarily burdening development projects that may take many years to build out."
— SEAN MOYLAN, assistant county attorney
School district staff members at the meeting urged the commission to delay a vote on the agreement until a later meeting. The topic hadn't been listed on the May 2 meeting agenda and was added during the meeting itself; school district staff were informed by email the morning of the meeting and therefore had little time to respond.
But the commission voted 4-1, with commissioner Andy Dance dissenting, to provide a 120-day notice of termination on the agreement. (Dance, echoing school district staff, suggested that the commission delay its vote.) The current agreement will remain in effect while a new one is created during the 120-day time frame.
The decision comes less than two months after the County Commission approved the school district's proposed hike in impact fees — levies assessed on new construction to offset development's impacts on infrastructure, schools and emergency services. Commissioners, at the time, had been sharply critical of the school district for pushing for a steep hike in impact fees while also maintaining another funding stream, called proportionate share mitigation payments, which also involves fees assessed to developers and which has been criticized by the Flagler Home Builders Association.
Commissioner Joe Mullins has repeatedly criticized the mitigation payment requirement, saying the payments amount to an up-front tax on new development.
"Taxes up front are never good," Mullins said. "It's just not the way this system was ... made to work."
Commissioners, at a meeting in March, initially looked poised to reject the impact fee increase, but ultimately agreed to approve it after Dance suggested that the commission could approve the fee hike, but arrange meetings between the school district and the Home Builders Association about the proportionate share mitigation payments, which developers pay when their development is projected to add new students to schools that are already over capacity.
Changing the proportionate share mitigation payment structure means revising the interlocal agreement between the district and the county government on the funding of new school facilities. It's also time to revise the agreement for other reasons, Assistant County Attorney Sean Moylan wrote to county commissioners in an April 28 letter.
The agreement, he wrote, dates back to 2008 and "is now very much outdated." For instance, he wrote, its text cites a Florida Administrative Code rule that is no longer in effect, and, at 34 pages, the agreement is overly long and contains passages that are redundant.
Moylan suggested terminating it and starting fresh by providing a 120-day notice of termination, giving a new working group with representatives from county staff, the school district, the Home Builders Association and other stakeholders 120 days to create a new one.
The issue of mitigation payments, Moylan wrote, is difficult because stakeholders have such divergent views, but mitigation payments are only needed when schools lack capacity for students that would be generated by a new development. Developers pay them up front, and the payment is credited toward the impact fees that would otherwise be due when individual units are constructed.
Mitigation payments could be eliminated entirely in a new version of the interlocal agreement, but the school district would object, Moylan noted.
"We have flexibility in shaping some form of a 'pay and go' system that will provide the school district with funding to offset the cost of constructing future schools without unnecessarily burdening development projects that may take many years to build out," Moylan wrote. "The resolution of this issue will be addressed by the working group."
The County Commission will have the final say on whether to approve the interlocal agreement created by the working group, which had its first meeting on April 18 and will meet again on May 19.
Dance suggested having an independent, expert third party consider the mitigation element of the interlocal agreement, but Mullins and Commissioner Greg Hansen said they considered the County Commission an independent third party.
