A state Supreme Court ruling in May exempted the adults-only retirement community, Aberdeen, from paying school-impact fees to the Volusia County School Board. The court reasoned that Aberdeen residents, none of whom can be younger than 18, were being forced to fund schools for which they generated no students.
The ruling may be a harbinger of what's to come. Florida's legislature recently proposed a yearlong moratorium on the fees. Although Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill, the Aberdeen ruling is being construed by many as a green light for retirement communities to challenge the fee's legitimacy--in Florida and elsewhere.
The school board argued that requiring proof of a community's impact on school population makes public education a utility, like water or sewer. Since public education ought to be free, their argument went, it is unfair to make only those who use it pay for it.
This traditional defense didn't hold up. The court has, says Richard Graham, attorney for the Volusia school board, "taken a really dim view of impact fees, because they see it as a potential illegal tax."
Better news for county schools, Graham notes, is that the case was highly specific due to Aberdeen's age restrictions, which are irrevocable for 30 years. The county redrafted its school-impact-fee ordinance to exempt communities with age restrictions similar to Aberdeen's. "Any community would have to have irrevocable restrictions before the Supreme Court would exempt them," Graham says.
Nonetheless, he admits the ruling suggests that "government agencies are going to have to look for alternatives to impact fees."
