Consulting firm released draft report on Sarasota County's fiscal neutrality methods

AECOM, the firm contracted by Sarasota County last year to analyze the current status of fiscal neutrality in the Sarasota 2050 plan, released its draft report on the development of fiscal neutrality methodology.

The county is inviting the public to review the draft document and provide input on its findings now through April 3.

AECOM stated in the report that the report did not assess fiscal neutrality as a valid tool, but that in the firm’s experiences, fiscal neutrality is one tool in a shed of impact evaluations.

In the report, AECOM recommended that the county develop a tiered schedule for impact fees based on geography for growth within the Sarasota 2050 plan to allocate areas of compact growth. The tiered system could be an alternative option for fiscal impact studies for individual projects.

AECOM also stated that the full cost of impact fees should be used when making a fiscal neutrality assessment, as calculating neutrality using suspended or reduced impact fees can distort the analysis. 

Some developments do not lend to a practical fiscal analysis, such as public hospitals, because they are not usually built based on new population but on the utilization of the services in that area. 

Here are some of AECOM’s other comments:

Fiscal impact analyses cannot be 100% accurate in predicting when, if ever, a development will begin to generate revenues or when the county can expect to spend funds from impact revenues, so the county should not try to match expenditures to a development’s timeline.

Using a case study approach for each expense category counted within fiscal neutrality is expensive for the county, and in turn to tax payers, and deters development. The studies are only accurate for available data which can change over time. Cumulative impacts are better to use for benchmarks than annual estimates because the former can indicate more than the trend of development for that year.

Inflation distorts the analysis impact of the development and should be removed from calculations.