Fort Myers Beach council advances overhaul of impact fees, cutting some rates and switching residential charges to size-based tiers

Fort Myers Beach — The Town Council advanced a broad update to the town's impact-fee rules on Monday, approving at first reading an ordinance that adopts an impact-fee study prepared by Access Infrastructure and DP Guthrie LLC and schedules a second reading and final adoption for Nov. 17, 2025.

The changes would consolidate many nonresidential categories into two buckets (retail/eating-and-drinking and all other services), replace older trip-based transportation calculations with a multimodal or "mobility" approach, and switch residential fees from a single flat per-unit charge to a tiered system based on dwelling square footage. The study and ordinance also reduce several fees compared with the current schedule and add an administrative charge to cover the town's cost of administering impact fees.

Jason Green, the town's community development director, introduced the measure and brought Dwayne Guthrie of DP Guthrie, the consultant on the study, to present the details. "The unique things about impact fees," Guthrie told the council, "they're not just a general revenue. It's a it's a dedicated, source of funding just to fund growth related infrastructure." He emphasized that impact-fee revenues must go into a special account and be used only for capital additions that expand capacity, not for ordinary operating or repair costs: "You can't do operating and maintenance costs. You can't replace things that got knocked down in a hurricane."

Why it matters: council members said the update reflects two forces — new state-level guidance and the town's post‑storm rebuilding pattern. Under the proposed rules, many commercial uses will pay lower per‑square‑foot transportation fees (consultant examples showed only about a 50¢ per‑square‑foot change for many nonresidential types). For residential development, the draft schedule ties fees to size brackets so that a much larger replacement home will pay the incremental difference compared with what was previously on the lot.

The ordinance spells out several other policy points discussed during the hearing: credits for existing development when calculating fees for redevelopment (for example, a hotel that adds rooms would receive a credit for the prior rooms), a proposed move from a five‑year to a seven‑year rule for when on‑site credits lapse (the consultants recommended seven years to account for storm recovery timelines), and a 90‑day transition period that applies after final adoption before new rates are collected for new permits.

The consultants also tied proposed fees to the council's 10‑year capital improvement program (CIP) for parks and transportation. For parks and recreation, the presentation identified about $5,000,000 in potential improvements to beach parks and other facilities, and the study allocated roughly 20% of that cost to new growth (about $1,000,000) as the portion reasonably borne by impact fees. For transportation, the study carried forward about $2.9 million in growth‑related multimodal capital items and allocated those costs between residential and nonresidential users (a 68% residential / 32% nonresidential split in the consultant's example).

Councilors pressed staff and the consultant on common questions for rebuilding communities: who actually pays the fee, how credits for prior uses or units are calculated, and how mixed‑use redevelopment (for instance marina to hotel and retail) will be handled. Guthrie said most impact fees are passed through to end users in the market (homebuyers or renters, business tenants), and that the town will evaluate credits by counting prior on‑site uses and measuring replaced versus new capacity. He illustrated how a hotel or lodging category is charged per room while residential, multifamily units and condos are placed into size bands.

Town staff said the update will standardize categories and make administrative handling easier, and that staff costs for administering the fee update are included in the proposal. Finance Director Joe Onzick said staff do not expect to need additional full‑time personnel to implement the change.

Public comment at the hearing was brief; no speakers signed up. After discussion, Councilor John King moved and a colleague seconded to send the ordinance to a second reading and final adoption hearing on Nov. 17, 2025, at 9 a.m. The motion carried unanimously.

The ordinance is a text amendment to the town code; if adopted at second reading the new schedule would apply to building permits issued after the 90‑day transition period spelled out in state law and the ordinance.