School board updating impact fees

Clay County school board members began discussing updates to the county’s current educational impact fee ordinance during a December 5 workshop.

Lance Addison, the district’s coordinator of planning and intergovernmental relations, presented a tentative timeline in which the Clay County Board of County Commissioners would vote on an updated educational impact fee on January 26.

Carson Bise, the author of the district’s impact fee study update, told board members that the county’s educational impact fee has not been adjusted since 2005. In that year, the school district asked for, and county commissioners passed, an impact fee for a single-family residence of $7,034. The school district commissioned impact study updates in 2009, 2013, and 2017. Each of those studies recommended changing the impact fee to $9,096, $8,247 and $10,732, respectively. However, in each of those years, the school board elected not to change the fee established in 2005.

The recommendation on the 2022 report is to raise the fee to $12,680 from the current $7,034, an 80% increase. However, a Florida law passed in 2021 limits school districts to increasing their impact fees to 50% of the current fee unless special conditions are met. Under that limitation, the district could only raise its fee to $10,551 instead of the $12,680 recommended by the study.

Under that same limitation, the educational impact fee for multi-family units would increase from $3,236 to $4,807 and for mobile homes from $5,979 to $8,948.

Bise told school board members that the different fees are based on census data that says 100 new single-family residences will generate around 50 new students, 100 additional multi-family units will create approximately 19 new students and 100 additional mobile homes will generate an average of 35 school-aged children.

Bise also said that his conservative estimate of student growth is an additional 4,800 students over the next 10 years.

The consultant added that Clay County’s elementary schools are now at 132% of utilization. The junior high schools are at 102% utilization and the senior highs are at 124%.

“That’s the highest I’ve ever seen in any school district,” Bise told board members. “Most times, you’re in the 80% to 90% range, and obviously given the lag time it takes to build schools, that’s when you start planning for that capacity.”

Bise said that if the district adds 4,687 additional student stations over the next 10 years, it could lower its kindergarten through eighth-grade utilization from the current 123% down to 113%. However, the district’s utilization would increase to 140% without the additional capacity.

The district plans to add nearly 9,700 new student stations through 2033 by building three kindergarten through eighth-grade campuses, one elementary school and two senior high schools. All of the new campuses are projected to be around Green Cove Springs, three to the west of the city and three to the south.

  The cost of those six campuses is estimated at $367.6 million.