ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – St. Johns County is continuing to evaluate and fund road improvements in a rapidly growing community. One potential solution, concurrency fees, which are based on the traffic a business generates, was rejected by the county commission this week.
The proposal aimed to roll back a previous exemption that has kept certain non-residential businesses from paying these fees.
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“In 2018, the board chose to remove, basically to exempt, the non-residential developments in St. Johns County from transportation concurrency,” he said.
Small business owners and the Chamber of Commerce voiced their concerns about the proposal on Tuesday arguing that removing the exemption would negatively impact small businesses.
Beth Breeding shared her perspective as a developer, “Businesses would walk into the county, find out how onerous it was, and they walked right back out and didn’t bring those jobs.”
Scott Maynard, Senior Vice President of Economic Development & Public Policy, spoke about concurrency.
“The chamber represents over 1,000 businesses, with 80% of those being small businesses. It’s those small businesses that we feel would be negatively affected by this proposal to rescind the county’s exemption for non-residential concurrency fees,” he said.
The county still needs to address road funding and maintenance. Dick D’Souza, Growth Management Assistant Director of Transportation, noted that larger businesses, like those in the World Golf Village, pay in advance for lane widening and preparation. He also explained that businesses exempt from the transportation concurrency were still paying for roads and infrastructure through impact fees.
“Anything that you’re building and pulling a permit on in the county, you’re likely going to pay an impact fee on that,” he said.
Regardless of the outcome, taxpayers and business owners will feel the effects. D’Souza explained that the cost of road infrastructure is still felt in other areas including the impact fees.
“We’ve added a couple of new categories that didn’t have previously and so those rates are just going to be higher than maybe what would have been paid previously,” he said.
Additionally, D’Souza mentioned that the county is exploring state and federal grants to manage growth effectively.