At long last, the Marion County Board of County Commissioners has decided to consider raising impact fees. Not implement, not enforce—just consider. After a decade of rubber-stamping every development project that lands on their desks, they’ve finally noticed that our roads are packed, our emergency services are stretched thin, and our parks are as overburdened as our taxpayers.
I’ve got news for them: it’s too late at this point. Just forget about it, the county is already ruined. This is like closing the barn door while the horse is galloping miles down the track. You can’t go back and retroactively collect all of the revenue you missed during the development boom, and you can’t undo the damage that has been done.
For over a decade, developers have been given the red carpet treatment while residents foot the bill for overcrowded schools, gridlocked roads, and an emergency services system gasping for air. Now, the commissioners are discussing an increase in fire impact fees, when the county is bursting at the seams. While our firefighters scramble to respond to ever increasing call volumes and our taxpayers eat the losses, the county’s idea of a bold solution is to finally charge developers a little more per house. How generous.
And let’s not forget the parks. While Lake County has been charging developers $661 per home to help maintain green spaces, Marion County has been charging exactly zero. Now, under great duress, our commissioners are contemplating a parks impact fee that should have been in place years ago. But don’t be fooled—this is not a sudden stroke of fiscal responsibility. This is an attempt to play catch-up after years of giving developers a free pass.
In case you’re wondering who benefits from all this unchecked growth, let’s do some math. Developers rake in millions while taxpayers were asked to approve a one-penny sales tax to cover the infrastructure that these very developers aren’t paying for. That’s right, our county commission has been so generous with impact fee waivers that they needed you to foot the bill. So while you sit in traffic that gets worse every year, while your kids’ schools burst at the seams, while your ambulance takes longer to arrive because call volumes are skyrocketing, just remember: you are subsidizing billion-dollar corporations so they can keep cranking out housing developments at record speed.
And what do the commissioners say? They hem and haw about “personal property rights.” Apparently, the rights of landowners to sell to developers supersede your right to a functioning road system. And if you dare to question why our infrastructure can’t keep up, you’re told to be patient while they hold yet another meeting to discuss possibly addressing the issue.
The Board of County Commissioners would like to paint this as a complicated issue, but it’s really quite simple: when you allow unchecked growth without requiring developers to pay their fair share, residents suffer. Every pothole you hit on your way to work, every overcrowded classroom, every fire station that struggles to meet demand. That’s the result of Marion County’s negligence over the past decade.
Now they want you to believe they’re taking bold action. They’re not. They’re doing what they always do, dragging their feet while developers cash in.
The next time you’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a road that wasn’t built for this many cars, ask yourself: Why am I the one paying for this mess? Then remember who’s been making the decisions for the past decade or more—and make sure they don’t get another decade to do it all over again.
Tom Herman
