Guest Viewpoint: Municipalities in Beaufort Co. must adopt impact fees to address growth
Beaufort County and the municipalities within the county have spent months, and in some cases years, discussing the need to adopt new impact fees for schools and emergency management systems and to renew/update existing fees.
Impact fees provide funding that maintains the fiscal health and services of the School District and County Government. They include School Impact Fees, EMS Impact Fees, Road Impact Fees, Parks & Rec Impact Fees, Library Impact Fees, and Fire Impact Fees as outlined in the draft Intergovernmental Agreements that have been provided to each municipality. These fees, collected in high-growth service areas such as Bluffton, help keep property taxes lower for everyone as well as help build the infrastructure that is required to serve the new residents.
Impact fees perform a vital function to our community. They require new growth to pay for the impact of that growth on existing infrastructure. Citizens moving to specific areas of our great county have created the need for infrastructure improvements. Developers and newly arrived citizens in all areas of Beaufort County should be required to pay, through impact fees, their proportional share for the growth they cause. If new development does not pay impact fees, the costs of the newly required infrastructure, which must be built to accommodate new arrivals, must be borne by existing taxpayers who did not cause the need for additional infrastructure.
After many months of verbal promises that have not materialized, Beaufort County municipalities seem to be ignoring their responsibilities to citizens by failing to vote on implementing the collection of impact fees. This failure shifts the burden of the costs of county growth to existing taxpayers in both the incorporated and unincorporated areas like Okatie, St Helena, Burton, Seabrook, Sheldon and the six municipalities, forcing existing taxpayers to pay the entire costs to build schools, roads, EMS stations, fire stations, libraries and recreation facilities in areas like Bluffton, Port Royal, and the city of Beaufort, where developers should have been charged impact fees to pay their fair share of these costs.
This lack of participation and cooperation by Hilton Head, Bluffton, Beaufort and Port Royal has led the Beaufort County Council to consider eliminating all existing impact fees and to abandon its efforts to adopt school and EMS impact fees. It has forced the county to make a tough decision. County Council will have to decide between continuing this forced inequity (a checkerboard of impact fees in the case of Library Impact Fees and Parks and Recreation Impact Fees that are charged in some municipalities and not in others, and School Impact Fees that only apply south of the Broad that are being charged in unincorporated Beaufort County but not in Bluffton or Hilton Head) on the one hand, and eliminating impact fees altogether and placing the entire costs of new development on the backs of existing taxpayers on the other hand.
By having to do this, Beaufort County taxpayers would be forfeiting a huge funding source that should be provided by impact fees, causing an unavoidable increase in property taxes for all citizens and, inevitably, a sizable debt liability on future generations through bonds and loans to fund the expansion of required infrastructure and facilities. County Council does not support or desire these options; it has clearly identified impact fees as the most logical and responsible way to provide services to the future residents of our community.
County Council has repeatedly called on all municipalities’ councils to agree to collect these fees in their respective municipalities. Elected leaders and town/city managers verbally agreed and supported the adoption of impact fees to keep property taxes stable. They agreed the fees are needed for facility infrastructure like new schools, roads, fire stations, EMS stations and equipment, and expanding facilities to meet new demands on our libraries and parks and recreation programs. Regrettably, with the exception of Yemassee that has agreed to collect all impact fees requested of them, the balance of the municipalities have not implemented some of the critical impact fees through the required Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs).
The county does its best to keep operational costs down through effective resource management and solid fiscal responsibility. The county even projects a small surplus for 2022 and adequate reserves to handle possible natural disasters. The county finds itself in the strongest financial position in recent memory. Adding federal and state dollars directed to be spent on roads, bridges, broadband and airport upgrades will keep our county financially stable but we lack the necessary dollars to build new facilities and to expand existing facilities that citizens count on most as new residents arrive every day and demand for these services and facilities continues to grow.
The county and school district must take on the costly endeavor of expanding our facilities’ infrastructure countywide to keep pace with growth while at the same time providing a solid education for our students and supplying the services our citizens expect.
The citizens of Beaufort County and the municipalities must call on the municipalities to adopt the impact fees. It’s time to choose: Use impact fees to fund our future or accept the consequences of inaction.
Joe Passiment is chairman of the Beaufort County Council.
This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 8:53 AM.