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Miami Beach committee backs updating impact fees, indexes utility connection fees to CPI
Summary
The City of Miami Beach Finance & Economic Resiliency Committee on Oct. 15 recommended that the full commission adopt staff proposals to index water and sewer connection fees to the CPI, perform a one‑time inflation catch‑up for sanitation rates, and update parks fees toward an impact‑fee model tied to a new parks master plan.
The Finance & Economic Resiliency Committee on Oct. 15 reviewed a systematic analysis of the city’s impact fees and recommended that the full commission approve a set of administrative changes aimed at keeping user charges current with inflation and the city’s planned levels of service.
Richard Ajami, assistant budget director, presented the review, explaining that staff divided charges into two categories: true impact/connection fees that are tied to new development and fees that can be mitigated or are percentage based. Ajami said the main takeaway is “impact fees, you can't mitigate them,” and described how staff proposes to update or maintain each fee category.
Key administrative recommendations the committee endorsed to send to the full commission included: - Keep the mobility fees and their CPI indexing as adopted in the most recent budget. - Index water and sewer connection/impact fees to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on an annual basis so the charges remain cost-based between multi‑year reviews. - Implement a one‑time catch‑up for the sanitation monthly fee, which has not been updated since 1998; staff reported the retroactive adjustment would raise the monthly sanitation rate by roughly 118% because the fee has not been inflation‑adjusted for decades, and then index it to CPI going forward. Public works staff clarified that the sanitation connection component applies to multifamily and commercial classifications (multifamily above the city’s current threshold is treated as commercial for sanitation). - Maintain the fee‑in‑lieu of parking at the current level after a recent review, because raising it could discourage its use and encourage more private parking construction. - Convert the parks concurrency flat fee ($98.75) into a contemporary impact‑fee model tied to an updated parks master plan and a study of levels of service, so fees better reflect the actual demand created by different land uses (hotels, commercial, residential). - Keep the sustainability fee as a percentage of job value (currently 5%) because it already scales with project cost and therefore captures inflation.
Committee members asked that staff study whether fees could be more finely scaled by land use intensity — for example, higher fees for transient (hotel) uses that place disproportionate demand on parks and other services — and to produce any required legal analyses. Carmen Sanchez, deputy director for planning, said the parks master plan would need updating to support an impact‑fee approach.
The committee voted to forward the administration’s package with a favorable recommendation to the full commission. Several commissioners asked that additional studies and legal reviews run in parallel where required and that any fee ordinance changes be returned to the commission in discrete steps rather than as a single monolithic package.
No final rate changes were adopted at the committee level; the committee action authorized staff to proceed to ordinance drafting and additional study where needed.
