Good evening everyone. Welcome to our workshop today, December 10th, 2025. The time now is 5:17. Roll call, please. >> Commissioner Irvin here. Commissioner Santiago, here.
>> Commissioner Baz here. So let's stand for our invocation followed by the pledge of allegiance. Father once more we want to say thank you for this is a day that you have made. Thank you oh God for hearts and minds that are willing to serve and serve in spirit and truth. Lord we give
you all honor and glory in Jesus name. Amen. >> Amen. >> Amen. to the flag of the United States of America indivisible with liberty and justice for all. If you may be seated,
>> Madame Manager, all yours. Thank you. At this time, I'll ask Mr. Gay to approach the podium and introduce the item for discussion. Members of the commission who were present and for the mayor and
commission, my name is Greg Reay, the director of planning and community development for the city of Opalaka. We are very pleased to bring forth to you a presentation regarding our impact fees as it relates to the city of
Opalaka and how it impacts development. This has been something that has been in the works for a little over a year. Uh we have consultants that have been working with us to go through this particular process um to basically
update our impact fees through a study. Uh it's been 10 years since we have looked at our impact fees and to be quite honest um some of them are somewhat dated. uh and it's part of that particular revenue stream. When new
buildings are built or if a property is expanded, those revenues are utilized to help with the services of the city of Opalaka. I have with me Mr. Peter Napolei uh Stantech who is the consultant that we
utilize for this particular service. He's going to be bringing you a presentation as to how where our our present situation of where we are with our impact fees and the recommendations that should be brought forth as to how we should address impact fees going into
the future. So I bring forth to the mic Mr. Peter Napolei. >> Thank you Mr. Gay for that introduction and uh good evening commissioners. Uh my name is Peter Napoli. I work with Stantech Consulting. Uh we help cities and counties throughout the state of
Florida with a variety of financial studies, rate studies, impact fee studies, special assessments, you name it. Um I was the project manager on this project for the city of Opalaka. Uh we have a brief presentation today summarizing the results of the impact
fee study and some recommendations for the commission to consider um in updating your impact fee schedule. um and I'd be happy to answer any questions um throughout or at the end, whichever you prefer. So, with that, I'll get into the presentation.
So, a little background on Opalaka's impact fees. As Mr. Gay was saying, they haven't been updated since 2015, and typically the recommendation is to update these fees every 3 to five years. So, they're a little overdue to be looked at and recalculated. Uh the city
currently charges impact fees for parks, police, storm water, water, and sewer. Uh so those are the impact fees that we're looking at. Actually, in 2015, our team was the team that calculated those impact fees back then. So um this is an
update to that. Um and and uh we've refreshed all the data and assumptions that go behind it and I'll explain all that to you today. So, the scope of this study was to recalculate the city's existing impact fees. A little background on impact fees
because there's often some confusion when it comes to impact fees on what you can use them for, how they're collected, who pays them. Impact fees are a one-time charge uh that's typically issued around building permit issuance to new development only. So, they don't
affect any existing taxpayers in the city. It's not a reoccurring charge. It's charged upfront when a developer comes in and builds a new home, a new warehouse, a new restaurant. Um, and they're designed to capture the impact
of that new establishment on the city services. So, with every new unit of growth that the city experiences, you have to expand your police services and water services, sewer services incrementally in order to um to absorb
that new development. And without an impact fee in place, the cost of providing that additional infrastructure and expanding the city is placed on the existing taxpayers if you don't have impact fees offsetting the cost of those
infrastructure items. So impact fees can only pay for capital. Uh they cannot pay for personnel services or operations and maintenance of buildings and facilities. We're talking new new buildings, new vehicles,
uh new water manes, new sewer mains, etc. So, this shows this table here shows the city's existing impact fees. Um, starting from the left hand side with the parks impact fee, it's currently at
almost a dollar, but 99 um 99 cents per square foot. Uh so depending on how big or how large the new development is, how large the house is, how large the warehouse is, they pay according to square footage. Public safety is currently set at 17
cents per square foot. Storm water is set at $829 per eru and that's basically a measurement based on the imperous area of a new development. Um, and that's the
logical connection there is that the more area that's paved over, uh, and that can't absorb rainwater, the more runoff they're adding to the storm water system, and the city has to deal with, uh, the additional drainage capacity from that. Water is per uh, eru as well,
and that's $1,400. Um, and that scales up according to meter size. So the larger the meter size of the development, the more they'll pay for the impact fee because the more flow capacity they're demanding on the city.
And the same with sewer. With the meter size, it scales and it's currently set at $1,279. This slide here is a lot, so I'll uh I'll take my time walking you through it, but this summarizes the new calculations overall for each of the fees. So if you look at the top row,
this is the row for the parks fee and it shows that there's two components of the calculation. There's the cost basis. So we look at how much um the infrastructure for this particular service costs in the city. So all of the parks that the city is invested in, all
the parks assets and land um and equipment goes into that cost basis. Then we divide it over the existing residents served to come up with a new fee per capacity or fee per unit. So the
updated fee in the orange column, it shows the updated fee for all of the different services is a $131 we're calculating for parks. That's a 31% increase over the existing fee. And you can see that off to the far right hand side. And that's the comparison to the
existing fee for all the different services that we calculated. Moving down to the next row, we have public safety. We established $3.8 million of existing costs and divided that over the existing units served to get 20 20 cents per
square foot, which is an 18% increase over the 17 cents the city currently charges. We did the calculation for storm water, $15 million in assets. Um, and there were significant uh CIP or master plan
items that I think we included in there and we included the growth. The fee that we ended up calculating for storm water following the the the typical procedure and methodology turned out to be $835, which is only a 1% increase over the
existing fee. Um the impact fees, you'll see that the results whenever you recalculate them always vary depending on how much the city has been investing in these different services over the last 10 years and also how much the city
has grown. So uh they don't always typically follow inflation. Uh it really depends on the specifics uh of the service type. So with the water fee towards the bottom there, establishing the cost basis of 26 million dividing it
over the con current connections in the city. So your current capacity in the water department resulted in a fee of $1,700. So that's an 18% increase over the existing fee. And then finally, sewer
had a cost basis of $30 million, which resulted in a fee of $2,400. And that is an 88% increase over the existing fees. So that's by far the largest increase out of all these different service types that we looked at.
So this gives you an idea. Uh those were the fees that we calculated. This is the actual fee at the end of the day because some of these are per square foot. So, we made an assumption. What's the average size of a new single family unit coming in? We chose 1,500 square ft.
Applied all the fees and and basically at the end of the day, the existing fee in the gray column would have been $5,200. You would have charged $5,200 at the time of building permit issuance. with these updated fees, that's
increased to $7,300. So, an increase of 38% overall when you take all of the uh five fees into consideration. So, it's a $1,400 additional uh for the city per
residential home. So, this next part I want to talk about here relates to impact fee law in the state. So, the state has recently made some changes to the impact fee law in the state statutes. And what they've done is they've put some caps in place
to limit how much cities can increase their impact fees year-over-year uh to kind of protect the development community from huge spikes in impact fees. Basically, what the caps say is that if you have an increase that's calculated by a study that um that the
city performs that's anywhere between zero and 25%, it has to be split over two years equally. So 12% and 12 a.5% if it was a 25% increase. If the increase is anywhere between 25 and 50%, it has
to be split over four years. So kind of phasing in these increases to uh to absorb the shock a little bit for for developers in the area. Increases over 50% are strictly not allowed and an
increase is only allowed once every four years now. So, um, a big recommendation that we're giving all of the cities and counties that we work with is to make sure that you do take advantage of that impact fee increase once at least once every four years since it's the only
time it's allowed now. So, now I'll go through each of the fees and how that increase would be phased in depending on where the increase falls in those limits that I just described. So for the parks and recreation impact fee,
we're recommending a 31% increase. So that falls into the category of being phased in over four years. So this table here shows the current fee at 99 cents. In year 1, it would increase by 8 cents to 108. Then in year two, 115 all the
way to year four, it would finally be at that 131. And then the city would have the chance to re-evaluate that fee at the end of the four-year schedule. The public safety fee increase falls in the first category. So it can be phased
in over two years. So we have that 17 cents going from 17 cents to 20 cents over the course of two years. Uh the city can adopt that increase. Button got stuck. And now we have the water and sewer
phased in increases. On that first row there, we show the water impact fee. That's an 18% increase. So, it can be phased in over a two-year time frame. The sewer impact fee was the largest increase that I showed you before. It was 88% is what we
calculated. That would have to be capped at 50%. The state says that that's the maximum you can adopt and it would have to be phased in over a 4-year period. So we have those fees being phased in on the schedule here and it shows how much
they increase on an annual basis. >> And so the last part of the presentation here just shows some surveys so you could see how does the city of Opalaka with these fees compare to other entities in the region. So starting with the parks and recreation impact fee, the
current fee at 1497, the proposed fee at 1965, you pretty much stay in the same place in the survey, right in the middle when compared to uh some other entities like Miami's at the top there and then Sunrise and Sunny Beach are towards the
bottom of the survey. The next survey shows the public safety impact fee. So the current impact fee is set at 255. Our proposed impact fee that we calculated is at 300. Um so it moves
you up one place but still uh at a pretty reasonable place in the survey. The storm water impact fee. What we're recommending is that since we calculated the fee and it ended up only being a 1% increase, we recommend the city just maintain the current storm water fee so
you don't have to make any changes to your city code. um in in regards to that fee. So, keeping it at 8.29 keeps you uh you know, sort of in the middle of the survey here. It's a much more rarer fee throughout the state. Um not a whole lot
of cities charge a storm water impact fee. So, that's really that's the list there. um with um believe that's supposed to be Penrook Pines, not Pemrook Park, but Fort Richie, Linhaven, Niceville, Fort Pierce.
And then the water and sewer impact fee, what we uh we're showing in the survey here on a combined basis because typically a new development is hooking up to both uh water and sewer. So, the combined fee is currently at $2,700
and the combined fee that we're proposing in the orange would be $3,600. So, it moves you up a couple spots in the survey there for the utilities. Um, and that's uh based on the average single family home.
So, the next step for uh the commission to consider uh is adopting these updated fees, these updated impact fees into your city ordinances. Um and and adopting the new schedule of impact fees. I believe there'll have to be
hearings involved with that. um in order to uh make any changes to the city code. And then finally, uh there would be notice 90 days in advance of collecting these new fees. Uh that's required by the state that you just uh you don't have to send out letters or anything,
but I think there's a a legal ad or notice required that you give uh before you collect the new amounts. And then we of course we recommend the city consider updating the impact fees on a four-year schedule uh going forward. Uh and that will make sure that
you're collecting as much as possible from these impact fees. Um and again every dollar collected in the impact fees goes towards offsetting the pressure on property taxes, utility rates, etc. from existing residents. Um,
and you can use those dollars to, you know, purchase new assets, uh, uh, build new facilities, expand your services as your city grows. So, that's the conclusion of the presentation I have for you today. I know that was a lot. I'd be happy to
answer any questions or revisit any of those, uh, slides. Uh, but thank you for having me. >> Are you in charge, >> the mayor? >> Oh, did they turn to you? >> Thank you. Let me turn the workshop over to >> Oh, I'm glad the mayor. Question and answers discussion.
>> I have a question. >> Commissioner Santiago. >> Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um question because I I love to to learn and do my homework before that I I make any decision. Now, um
I see that that story that you make is only for residential single family house. >> No. So that's not Yeah, that was just a comparative but there would be a >> comparative or that's the story that you do only to that station of the city
single family home. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What happened to uh commercial property industrial and all these uh big uh uh
uh places that we have for apartments and everything that coming you know to the future. Why only we impact uh the single family house? The the uh the they told you something about Opaaka. The Opalaka is
not a a very rich uh neighborhood. You know that the people have a lot of money like I see here Kay Miami. Miami is big. Miami had like four million people living in Miami in the city. Okay. We are
a beautiful city but we have a lot of you know our things back to the family. We don't have the enough money that a lot of people believe that we have to go and pushing you know the single family home to pay more taxes. >> So um that's a great question
commissioner and I kind of glossed over that but I just use single family home as an example. It would apply to all new developments. So multif family, commercial, industrial, every new unit of development would have to pay an impact fee as they come in.
>> Yeah. >> Single family is just one that we often use as a comparison because it's easier to, you know, uh communicate the the impact to a single family home. But the uh two of the fees are scaled by square
footage and they apply to all non-residential uses, too. And the larger the non-residential use, the more they pay in impact fees. Um, one thing I would like to point out, there is um, a section of the law that if it's a an
affordable housing development or it has to meet certain criteria, I believe they can be exempt from impact fees if a certain development like that comes in. So if it is a issue of affordability and it's a certain type of project you're looking to uh promote and and help you
know offset the barrier because impact fees can be a lot they have to pay upfront at building permit issuance and affordable housing project may be exempt from impact fees. >> All right. Okay. Thank you. For the moment I'm okay with that. I don't have
to call help me outward in case anything happened. Uh, Mr. Mayor, >> any other questions? All right. Hearing none. Seeing none. Um,
this is a public Okay. So, we open up for public comments. Public comments is open. And those of you that are speaking on it says on it's on the agenda that are speaking on public comments, we ask that you stay germanine to the topic. Public comments is open.
Hearing none, seeing none. Public comments are closed. >> All right. So, madam manager, is there anything else? Mr. Gay, Madam Manager, M. >> Mayor and Commissioner, in closing, I would just like to say that we really
appreciate this opportunity to have this analysis put forth before you. I know there's been questions before as to where we are with our impact fees. So through this presentation you see that our impact fees do need to be adjusted um in some way shape or form. Now the
impact fees are generally for new development. Um in some cases um three out I think four out of the five impact fees that we do charge apply to all all of the properties or or at least
for commercial, industrial and and residential. I think residential also pays into the parks impact fee. That's the only one and that's by state statute. So, that one is is is the only one that's really applicable to
residential as um residential developments only. Uh all all of the others are applicable to all of our new development that will occur within the city of Opalaka. And I just like to take a moment to thank the city manager, the assistant city manager and staff for
basically working through this particular process and getting us to this point to make this presentation for you. >> Mr. Mayor, >> Commissioner B. >> Thank you. I thought that the presentation was very thorough. So that's why I have very few questions. But just to reiterate, um, you stated
that our metig documents, but I don't have my glasses. I was like I have to leave and go pick them up. Um, we should have already updated this like since 2015. That's what you said, right? Correct. >> So, we're like far behind and updating.
It should be updated. You said two to three years. Every two to three years. >> Now, it's on the schedule, Commissioner of every four years. Allowed to update the impact piece beforehand. You could update them every year if you wanted to, but since the law changed a couple years
ago, they've limited how often you can increase your impact on >> Okay. I just wanted you to verbalize that again saying that since 2015 it's 20 going to 2026 we haven't visited um the impact fees that is due to our city.
So thank you. Thank you Mr. Mayor. >> Right. And final question and then we can close out so we can have a break in between. U Mr. Gase I saw um next steps uh notice required 90 days before effective date. What what what is
>> um the notice requirement is basically once the impact fees are adopted and and approved and and the schedule is updated. Okay. We have to do a noticing. Okay. >> Um through through the city attorney's office to basically and advertise it >> through the clerk's office that so that
the general public knows that we've done these modifications to our impact fees. And we had to do that over 90. >> And how soon are you bringing this to the board? We would hope to bring it in January. >> First meeting in January. >> Second >> second meeting.
>> Yes. >> Just so February. So February. All right. And two readings and then we moving on. All right. All right. All hearts and minds are clear. All right. Can I get a motion to adjurnn? Moved by um second
>> Commissioner B. Second by Commissioner Santiago. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you.