Letter to the Editor: By Bernie Little, President, Horse Farms Forever

Bernie Little of Horse Farms Forever is shown during a Marion County Commission meeting on Feb. 20, 2204. [File photo by Bruce Ackerman]

I was surprised to see my picture with David Tillman highlighting your story on March 19th titled “SB 1118: A builder’s perspective.” (www.ocalagazette.com/sb-1118-a-builders-perspective/) Many of my friends were also surprised and confused as they thought I was endorsing Mr. Tillman’s perspective. Not true.

I would like to offer a different perspective to Senate Bill 1118. My perspective is that of a retired business owner now serving as a volunteer for Horse Farms Forever, focused on the preservation of horse farms and rural land in the face of unrelenting development.

I know Mr. Tillman professionally and hold him in high regard, with one caveat; he is biased in favor of his clients and members. That’s not a bad thing if he represents you, it just means that his work is for compensation and thus, as expected, his position and opinion are from that perspective.

The comments made by Mr. Tillman in your article on the impact of Senate Bill 1118 are biased by his role as president of the Marion County Building Industry Association, where Mr. Tillman is expected to advocate on behalf of its members. It reminds me of listening to the tobacco industry telling us that cigarette smoking was good for our health.

With that said, here’s a fact that I think Mr. Tillman and I agree on: Marion County’s population is growing. It is undeniable that the growth pendulum in Florida and especially Marion County has swung in the growth direction. According to the Census Bureau, the Ocala metro area ranked No. 1 for growth among metro areas nationwide between July 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024, with a population increase of 4%, the highest percentage in the nation.

Growth can be good for a community, if it is well-planned and fairly and concurrently pays for its impact on schools, public infrastructure and community services through sales taxes, impact fees and property taxes. Our county’s elected leaders recently put two sales tax initiatives on the ballot to help pay for the deferred cost of growth. The voters said yes to those initiatives. And the commissioners are currently debating and considering impact fees to further offset the deferred costs of growth.

Impact fees are not new to Marion County. However, during an economic slowdown about 15 years ago, the elected leaders responded to the call of the building industry to waive impact fees to make building more affordable. Most of those waivers have remained in place even as very robust growth has returned to our community.

According to an article in the “Ocala Star Banner” newspaper on June 05, 2012, “Marion County Commissioner Stan McClain received quick and total support from his colleagues after calling for suspending transportation impact fees for another year.”

“The commission had ended the collection of such fees in 2010 and in January 2011 extended the ban through the end of this year. Commissioners hoped that would spur the local economy. McClain said he wanted to bring the issue up now instead of waiting until the board is scheduled to go through the annual exercise of trying to index the fees for the coming fiscal year. With little discussion, the board backed his proposal to suspend collection of all the fees through the end of 2013.”

Now, 12 years later, impact fees are finally back on the county commission’s agenda as a top priority.

With record population growth, the net result of those paused impact fees is that the growth we are experiencing today is not paying its fair share of the impact on schools, roads, utilities, law enforcement and fire/emergency services. This is well documented in multiple costs of community services studies and an unpleasant fact your paper has often highlighted in previous stories. There’s another alarming concern—the impact fees being proposed today are based on historical costs that are behind the growth curve and don’t nearly compensate for the true impact of growth during the future cost cycle.

When population growth does not pay its fair share of the impact it makes on schools, infrastructure and community services, then the burden of those costs falls unfairly on the shoulders of the existing community.

With this staggering amount of growth and backlog of infrastructure needs, it is time to manage and moderate our county’s population growth until the needed schools, infrastructure and essential services can be concurrent with today’s population before we start building for a future population. If that requires a moratorium on new building, then that is what should be considered and debated by our elected officials.

How does Senate Bill 1118, introduced by Marion County’s own Stan McClain, factor into this population growth and unrelenting development? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Senator McClain’s bill is special interest legislation written to benefit developers and fast-track growth by taking authority out of the hands of local government and restricting public input.

Recent articles in two publications offer insight into the driving force behind the bill.

“The proposed state legislation is a priority for the Florida Home Builders Association as well as Deseret Ranches, the real estate arm of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints which has lobbyists working on the bill. Deseret Ranches owns hundreds of thousands of acres of ranch and swamp land spanning the eastern edge of Orange County, dipping into Osceola and Brevard.” the “Orlando Sentinel” reported.

“Long-term blueprints outline development across an area spanning nearly 250 square miles. Those plans envision 220,000 homes, 100 million square feet of commercial and institutional space and close to 25,000 hotel rooms—almost as many as Walt Disney World has,” “Florida Trend” reports.

The public may never know the identity of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pulling the strings on Senate Bill 1118. I predict questions like what law firms participated in writing the actual text of the bill and who paid them will go unanswered. That’s the nature of Tallahassee politics.

That’s not the case in Marion County where we are blessed to have five excellent county commissioners. I have attended almost a thousand hours of public hearings and can attest firsthand that they work hard to do the right thing for Marion County and its citizens. While I don’t always align with their decisions, I completely trust them to carefully consider the facts and circumstances and use the democratic process to reach the best decision. Most importantly, they do it in a manner that is respectful of the citizens and transparent.

Local governments are organized closest to where people live to best understand and meet community needs, solve local problems and deliver the quality-of-life amenity services. Senate Bill 1118 seeks to take away the authority of local governments and stifle public input on local planning and zoning matters. Notwithstanding the bias otherwise, it is bad policy and sets a terrible precedent.