An increase in school impact fees charged on newly permitted single-family homes, multi-family homes and mobile homes will increase on Jan. 1, 2025.
The Pasco County Board of County Commissioners adopted the ordinance on new fees by a vote of 4-1 during its Aug. 21 meeting in New Port Richey.
Commissioner Seth Weightman voted against the increase. Commissioners Lisa Yeager and Jack Mariano joined Commission Chairman Ron Oakley and Commission Vice Chair Kathryn Starkey in voting in favor of the increase.
The impact fee for a single-family detached home, which is currently $8,328, will be $9,328 next year. The impact fee will then increase annually through 2028 when it will be $12,328.
The impact fee for multi-family homes, including apartments, is currently $4,884 and it will be $6,389 in 2028. Mobile home fees will go from $5,114 now to $6,477 in 2028.
School impact fees are used by the Pasco County School District to help pay for school construction, including additional classroom space, and the purchase of land and school buses.
Commissioners were told the cost of all those things provided for by school impact fees have gone up significantly over the past few years.
For example, the cost of building schools has nearly doubled since 2017, according to district records. It cost about $178 per square foot to construct Cypress Creek Middle School in 2017 while the cost for a new school building that was recently constructed was about $390 per square foot, district records said.
Weightman said he was opposed to the increase because total impact fees in Pasco County will be over $34,000 when fees for parks and other public services are also included. Increasing the fees could result in Pasco County being a less affordable place to live, according to Weightman.
“Our impact fee today is $30,440 in the highest zone. When we add this over the next four years, it’ll compound over $34,000 and the other impact fees that this board is looking at coming out of line so very quickly, we’re going to be approaching probably the $40,000 mark, which is more money than some folks make in a year.
“I’m concerned with our fee structure that it’s going to erode away the opportunity of home ownership for folks. I just want to put it into perspective that our impact fees are starting to be very heavy and are going up and going up and going up.” Weightman said he thought a workshop should be held to consider ways to reduce impact fees.
Weightman also said he was concerned about the additional financial burden that would be placed on Pasco County property owners by the passage of a $3,500 fee that was approved for parks. He said that schools to him are a bit more important than parks. Weightman also added he hoped the new parks tax could be reduced before the budget for fiscal year 2024-25 is adopted.
Starkey countered by saying the cost of living in Pasco County is “still very affordable” when compared to some other counties in Florida.
Oakley said there’s a demand for schools in Pasco County to get bigger and better because of the number of people who are moving into Florida and into Pasco County. This also requires that the county’s parks be kept up so both current and new residents may enjoy them.
Yeager said she agreed with Weightman that schools should be a top priority.
”We’ve got to make sure that we get our money to schools,” Yeager said. “I agree to maybe back off the parks a little bit because we just can’t be hammered by all these fees at once, and we also have the MSTU for paving and it’s all going to add up.”
She was referring to the ordinance establishing the Road Rehabilitation Services Municipal Service Taxing Unit that commissioners adopted June 18 as a new way to fund road paving, rehabilitation, sidewalks and drainage facilities. The new ordinance will assess all property owners in unincorporated areas of Pasco County a tax of $51.84 per each $100,000 of assessed value. It won’t become effective until September when final decisions are made on the county’s budget for fiscal year 2024-25.
The new rate will be on Truth in Milling notices that will be distributed to the affected property owners later this year.
This ordinance did away with the method previously used by the county in which funding for road improvements were based upon residents living on those roads being individually assessed for the cost of the work that had been done. It had taken up to 10 years in some cases for the affected property owners to pay off their assessments.
Under an ordinance the board adopted at its July 9 meeting, property owners who still owed money on the old assessments were relieved of having to continue paying them. This amounts to the county not being repaid $13 million for principal and interest that hadn’t been collected on the old assessments.
Yeager also added she thought that maybe commissioners could “back off the parks a little bit.”
Mariano said he favors the increase in the fees because new residents are paying for the cost of the growth that the county is experiencing.
Tom Wilbirt, of the West Pasco Board of Realtors, told commissioners during a public comment portion of the meeting that his organization wasn’t in favor of the increase. The growth that Pasco County is currently experiencing “is one of the main drivers of the economy” but higher impact fees “does nothing but drive up the cost of housing in our community,” Wilbirt said.
