- June 16, 2025
The Palm Coast City Council is moving forward with two of the three impact fee studies, one of which will increase the fire service fee by 117%.
The city is reviewing the impact fees for transportation, fire service and parks and recreation. At the June 3 council meeting, the council unanimously approved the first of two votes raising the fire service and parks and recreation fees while the transportation fees were sent back for more revisions.
Vice Mayor Theresa Carli Pontieri said it is the council’s job to make sure its position is legally defensible if the council is going to increase the impact fees at such high rates.
“We have to make sure that we are buttoned up every which way to Sunday on this,” she said. “And I just don't think we're there yet.”
Typically, Florida law prohibits increasing impact fees by more than 50% of the current rate but once every four years and increases must be phased in over a two- to four-year period. But the state statute does provide an exception, if a municipality proves there are “extraordinary circumstances.”
Three studies commissioned by the council on each impact fee state that a combination of Palm Coast’s rapid growth and extreme inflation rates qualify Palm Coast for extraordinary circumstances needed to bypass a statutory cap on increasing impact fees. Impact fees are the fees developers pay to a municipality that are intended to help the city mitigate the impact of new growth on city services.
Over the next 25 years, Palm Coast is projected to grow by 49%, which is more than double Florida’s projected growth rate of 22%. Meanwhile, building costs have increased 80% since 2018, according to the studies.
The changes under extraordinary circumstances have to be approved in two supermajority votes for each impact fee. The fire service and parks and recreation fees will have their final vote on June 17.
Below are the details of each impact fee as discussed in the June 3 meeting:
TRANSPORTATION IMPACT FEE VOTE TABLED
The City Council decided to table the vote on the transportation impact fees as the council requested more changes to the calculations.
On May 27, the council made several changes to the presented calculations, including removing Highway U.S. 1 from the maintenance and capacity portion of the data as that road is maintained by the Department of Transportation.
One of the changes made at the workshop was to introduce a tiered rate for single family residential units. This was done to protect the first-time homebuyers and essential workers like teachers and first responders from being priced-out of the housing market.
“One of my biggest concerns is a new couple getting started out in life or a new individual getting started out in life and the housing affordability,” Council member Charles Gambaro said.
Jonathan Paul of NUE Urban Concepts - the firm that conducted the transportation impact fee study - introduced a tier system that split the houses in two categories: above and below 2,000 square feet, where the larger house size paid more in fees.
The initial study recommended the single family residential unit rate increase 137% from the current rate of $3,502. The two-tier system presented would instead increase the fee for homes greater than 2,000 square feet to $6,082 and for homes less than 2,000 square feet to $4,643.
But the council felt that this did not go far enough. Vice Mayor Theresa Carli Pontieri said the 2,000 seemed large for a starter home.
Paul suggested that, instead of choosing an arbitrary number to split the tier at, the city increases the fees in increments based on the house size. This would allow the homebuyer to decide and stay within their budget, Paul said.
The council also made other amendments to the calculations. It was requested to remove the section of State Road 100 from Old Kings to Colbert Lane from the calculations, as well as decreasing the anticipated funding again, as the the city has removed the bulk of state-maintained projects from consideration in the study.
Because of the substantial changes made, the calculations will be redone and presented again to the council at the June 10 workshop meeting.
FIRE SERVICES IMPACT FEES TO INCREASE 117%
During the previous workshop meeting, the council only spotted one area that needed change to the fire services fee: there was an error in the calculations that included grant funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.
“Essentially what happened is the ARPA funds were counted twice,” Raftelis representative Sean Ocasio said. Raftelis conducted the studies for both the fire service and parks and recreation fees.
The corrected calculations changed the percentage increases from a 98% increase per residential unit to 117%, and from an 95% increase per 1,000 square feet of nonresidential development to an 113% increase.
The change means developers would pay $942 per dwelling unit for residential development and $1,495 per 1,000 square feet of nonresidential. The current fire service rate is $434.51 for residential and $700 for nonresidential.
The calculations take into account the list of current projects in the city’s 10-year Capital Improvement Plan, call volume, projected growth, estimated state, federal or grant funding and the current level of service.
PARKS AND RECREATION FEES TO INCREASE 73%
At the previous meeting, the council removed several projects from its 10-year CIP plan in order to reduce the recommended rate from over 90%. The projects removed represented about $40 million in projected costs, Ocasio said.
The new number is a 73% increase to $3,164 per dwelling unit. The current rate is $1,828 per dwelling unit.
Palm Coast has a minimum standard service level of eight acres of recreation land per 1,000 people. Its actual service level is 10 acres per 1,000 people.
During public comment on the transportation fee, Flagler Homebuilders Association Executive Officer Annamaria Long said the projected growth rate used in all three studies does not count as “extraordinary circumstances” because the city was expected to grow at this rate since at least the 2020 impact fee studies, which projected similar growth rates.
“This population growth was not only expected, but accepted by the city,” Long said.
Ocasio said during his presentations that while the previous studies in 2020 did project a similar growth rate, but the impact is still significant to Palm Coast.
“While they haven’t materialized quite to the extent that was projected,” he said, “they’re still nonetheless very significant for your community.”
