Indian River County, Florida

Multi-Facility Impact Fee Study
   

For Indian River County, Duncan Associates prepared an update of traffic, schools, parks, libraries, fire rescue, law enforcement, corrections, public buildings and solid waste impact fees prepared by another consultant. Several deviations from the methodology used in the previous study were made to simplify the impact fee system. The first major change was to base all of the updated fees at or below the existing level of service. The previous study had based several of the

fees on the higher level of service anticipated to be provided in five years. Another major deviation was a significant simplification of the “functional population” calculations. The previous study used an 11-hours-per-day, 5-days-per-week functional population for public buildings, rather than the 24-hours-per-day, 7-days-per-week functional population used for the other three facilities. This had the effect of putting most of the burden of public building costs on nonresidential development. Major changes were also proposed for the solid waste fee methodology, which had been based on the cost of incremental landfill improvements. Instead, our study recoups the cost of upfront landfill investments (land and heavy machinery) that will be consumed by new development, and allocates convenience center costs only to residential development.