Aventura

Offsetting the Impact

Aventura approves revised transit impact fee

By Randy Abraham

City officials passed a revised transit impact fee to help offset the impact of future developments on area roads.

The fee, which will become effective in January, will be used to fund the expansion of the Aventura Express community shuttle service, which is free for city residents.

However, the fee passed on final reading in late April was 40 percent lower than one initially approved in January. At that time, commissioners passed an ordinance on first reading to impose a $1,320-per-unit impact fee for residential dwellings, a $2,115 fee for new office units and a $2,993 fee for new retail units.

Yet, after members of the development community opposed the impact fee amounts, city officials revised the fee structure. When the ordinance takes effect in January, developers will now have to pay an $803-per-unit impact fee for residential dwellings, a $1,286 fee for new office units and a $1,797 fee for new retail units. The fees would not apply to projects previously approved.

Truly Burton, governmental affairs director for the Builders Association of South Florida, said the requirement would pose an additional drag on the already-slumping development industry, and argued that the fee should not be used for operations and maintenance. “Most impact fees are specifically for capital improvements: schools, parks, roads,” she said. “It defies legal precedence that the [ordinance’s] specifications include operations and maintenance — but it’s still there. We’ll build a road, but not maintain it or re-stripe it — that’s what taxes are for. The cities have got to do a better job of ensuring that the fees they’re asking for are really justified.”

However, Burton was pleased with the changes the city made between first and second reading. “At least it’s an acknowledgment that the development community is not doing well at all,” she said.

Greenberg Traurig attorney Mario Garcia-Serra said the revised version improved over the first. “We are supportive of the reduced fee and delayed effective date,” Garcia-Serra said. “We think that they were well-reasoned accommodations for a worthwhile fee. Considering the current state of the economy and the local real estate market in particular, we believe that local governments should also be considering incentives to jump-start economic growth and development and not get caught up in trying to address the effects of a building boom which is now nonexistent.”

However, Aventura resident Mildred Husak spoke against the measure, arguing that it would fuel additional development. She argued that when the city, in its 1998 comprehensive master plan, established itself as a transit concurrency exemption area, it hampered its ability to address the consequences of high-density development. “The number one concern is overdevelopment and traffic,” she told commissioners.