Cape Coral consultant outlines proposed mobility fee replacing road impact fee; builders warn of project impacts

Jonathan Paul, principal of New Urban Concepts and consultant to Cape Coral City, told a city workshop the mobility plan lays out a 20-year vision for how people will move around the city and provides the basis for a new mobility fee to replace the city’s existing road impact fee. “A mobility fee is intended to replace the city's existing road impact fees. It is a one-time fee paid by new development only,” Paul said.

Paul said the mobility plan groups projects into four components — a road and intersection plan, a multimodal plan, a transit circulation plan and implementation programs — and recommends four assessment areas within the city so fees vary by location and by expected projects. He described the fee methodology change for residential development from a per-dwelling-unit basis to a per‑square‑foot basis, saying that “if you build a smaller home, you pay a smaller fee. If you build a larger home, you would pay a larger fee.” Paul noted the typical Cape Coral house is roughly 2,000 square feet and gave a Central Cape example: the calculated mobility fee for a 2,000-square-foot home would be $12,600 compared with the city’s current road impact fee of $3,347.

Paul and staff emphasized that Florida law constrains how quickly a…