A Times Editorial

Deadline requires fast action on overdue school impact fee

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 27, 2000

Over the next 10 years, enrollment in Pasco County's public schools is expected to grow to more than 59,000 children. More than half of those 13,000 additional students can be attributed to new development, according to a school district-commissioned study.

New students mean an even greater need for more school buildings in a district that has opened 10 new schools over the past decade and already has the equivalent of eight elementary schools attending classes in portable classrooms. By the end of this decade, the district will need nearly 800,000 square feet of additional school space -- that is the equivalent of 10 elementary schools or almost four high schools -- plus additional portables, just to meet the projected enrollment.

The numbers are part of the impetus for a newly proposed school impact fee, a onetime charge assessed to new home construction. The Pasco County Commission introduced the impact fee ordinance Tuesday and will hold its first public hearing next week. Final consideration is scheduled for later in May.

While developers likely will bemoan a rush job, that is not the case. The necessity of a school impact fee has been discussed for nearly five years, since voters turned down a proposed penny sales tax for new schools in 1995, and the school district presented county officials with an earlier version of the impact fee schedule in 1997.

While the idea has been kicked around for years, there is a deadline looming that requires commissioners to act expediently.

The state Legislature put a moratorium on new school impact fees until July 1, and now it is considering legislation outlawing the fees altogether. To make up for the lost revenue, districts would split the proceeds of a tax home owners already pay on mortgages. Pasco's school district is seeking to implement its impact fees in order to be eligible to obtain a share of that revenue.

As we've stated previously, the dawdling that marred the School Board's earlier quest for an impact fee need not be repeated. In 1997, a plan to charge up to $1,200 per single-family home for school construction never was presented to the commission because of questions raised by the county's legal staff and political concerns about the size of the fee.

The legal entanglements have been overcome, but commissioners still will face likely opposition from developers about the amount of the fee -- $1,706 per single-family home.

The arguments are predictable. Since the late 1980s, builders and developers have contended impact fees stunt growth and price people out of the new-house market. Hardly. More than 50,000 people moved into Pasco County during the 1990s after the county adopted impact fees for transportation and water and sewer service that now total more than $4,200. And, there is no sign of the building boom slowing. The county issued 3,052 housing construction permits in the last fiscal year, the highest total in the 1990s.

Under other circumstances, the impact fee could mean $3.9-million annually to the school district for each of the next 10 years. The pending legislative action in Tallahassee, however, means the county may receive about $1-million a year, and then only until 2004.

Commissioners, however, need to focus on their ordinance, not the shortcomings of a bill in the state Legislature. Adopting an impact fee to help finance school construction is long overdue.

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