The Apopka City Council voted unanimously on a first reading to implement the following impact fee increases on single-family dwelling units: 49% for police, 56% for fire, and 28% for parks and recreation.  

The City Council approved the first reading of the impact fees Wednesday, with a second reading and adoption of the new fees scheduled for the Dec. 17 regular City Council meeting.  

If the new impact fees are adopted, there is a 90-day waiting period after the effective date of Dec. 3 before the city starts to collect the new fees.  

Earlier Wednesday, the council held a second workshop on the municipal impact fee “extraordinary circumstance” – a legally required finding in order to raise an impact fee more than 50%.  

At the workshop, Sean Ocasio, senior manager at Raftelis Financial Consultants, presented the study. New development and redevelopment will pay the impact fees, helping to fund growth-related capital costs and debt, Ocasio said.  

The new impact fees won’t be assessed on current residents but on developers – who in turn may pass the cost to new residents. 

The city’s high population growth, averaging 2.8% annually since 2010, necessitates these increases, Ocasio said. The municipal website says the city population was 41,543 per the 2010 census, and as of April, the current city population is 66,580. 

“Just for a little bit of sense of scale: the state average is approximately one and a half,” Ocasio told the City Council. “So you’re growing at a higher rate than the state itself on an average basis. You have continued population growth projected for your community, and that population growth is what’s necessitating the expansion of your capital facilities, adding [Fire] Station 6 and adding other facilities and so on to the community.” 

 The study proposed the following per single-family dwelling unit: police increase from $747 to $1,116, fire increase from $708 to $1,104, and parks and recreation increase from $1,060 to $1,358.  

The impact fee increase per multi-family dwelling unit is as follows: from $747 to $892 for police (19%), from $708 to $883 for fire (25%), and from $1,060 to $1,086 for parks and recreation (2.4%).  

In 2016, Raftelis – at the time known as PRMG – also conducted the study that created the impact fees currently in place for city police and fire. Before that time, the city didn’t charge these impact fees, although it did have parks and recreation fees. None of the impact fees have increased since 2016.  

At the workshop, resident Albert McKimmie said that recent unprecedented housing growth makes past average growth figures misleading and that the current timing of impact fee collection may not address existing infrastructure needs.

“We’re still going to have to fund infrastructure that’s currently not satisfactory for what we’re doing, and that’s if those impact fees already been being paid, you’re not going to be able to take those from the public, and you’re not going to be having the same growth over the next four or five years as we currently have,” he said