Planning and Development details impact-fee rules, permit trends and $5.3M permitting system upgrade

Planning and Development staff presented a budget overview to the Brevard County Board of County Commissioners on March 27, outlining permit and impact-fee trends, legal restrictions on fee use, workforce challenges and a planned technology upgrade to the department’s permitting system.

Presenter Billy Prasad told commissioners the department processes about 100 building permits daily, performs roughly 216 inspections a day and oversees about 77 employees. He said the department collects impact fees that largely pass through to other agencies and that about $80 million of the $108 million P&D budget are impact fees; removing those leaves roughly $28 million that funds day-to-day operations.

Prasad reviewed trends showing a recent drop in the number of impact-fee assessments and explained statutory limits: impact-fee revenues must be earmarked for acquiring, constructing and improving capital facilities to benefit new users and “specifically…you can’t use it for repairs and maintenance,” he said in the presentation, attributing that language to statute. He described geographic restrictions on specific impact-fee funds — for example, education funds collected in the North must stay in the North — and described current work on an RFP for a consultant to perform an impact-fee study for EMS and fire. He said the RFP was advertised March 14 and proposals are due April 8.

On building permits and code enforcement, Prasad said permit numbers have declined since 2019 but permit job values rose, producing higher revenue in fiscal 2024 despite fewer permits. He explained statutory limits on how building-code fee revenue may be used and noted a 25% mandated reduction in inspection or review fees when private providers are used, citing Florida Statute 553.791 as the statutory authority for that reduction.

Prasad described workforce pressures — an aging workforce and recruitment difficulty in key code areas — and emphasized technology as a response. He said the board approved using $5.3 million in building-code funds for an upgrade to the Accela/“BAS” permitting platform (referred to in the presentation as a move to a cloud-based Accela upgrade and an integrated “OpenCounter” decision-tree public interface). Prasad said the upgrade is intended to speed permitting, provide quarterly updates from the vendor, enable better bottleneck reporting and GIS integration, and expand online permit and virtual inspection capabilities that the department has already increased sharply since 2020.

Commissioners asked clarifying questions about GIS data exchange with the property appraiser and about inspection and parcel-line accuracy. No formal board action was taken during the presentation; Prasad said staff would return with further details on the impact-fee study and implementation.