Marion County Building Safety department faces building boom challenges

Marion County’s building boom has led to dilemmas for its building safety department—too much money and not enough qualified personnel.

Florida Statutes allow local government to collect fees associated with enforcement of Florida building codes. However, to ensure these fees don’t become a profit center for the local government, the statute restricts the way those fees can be used and how much of a balance the fund can carry.

According to the statue, the money collected in fees can only be used for “direct costs and reasonable indirect costs associated with review of building plans, building inspections, re-inspections and building permit processing; building code enforcement; and fire inspections associated with new construction” as well as “training costs” associated with enforcement. Also allowed under the statute, is building a structure that “houses a local government’s building code enforcement agency.”

In addition to putting limitations on how the money can be spent, the statute also restricts local governments from carrying forward a fund balance that exceeds the department’s average operating budget for the previous four fiscal years.  

As of February 28, the fund balance had a $13,705,247 surplus of what the statute allowed.

In order to address the unique budget bind, Marion County Board of County Commissioners, during their regular March 15 meeting, approved a resolution that temporarily reduces certain fees and charges for building and safety permit applications by 40% as well as zeroing out all the fees that were previously calculated by how many square foot the proposed structure was. The proposed residential permit would only cost $90 and commercial permits $180 as of April 1, 2022.

Under the revised fee structure,  revenue would be reduced annually by $4 million and the fund balance would eventually drop into statutory compliance by fiscal year 2024, according to a presentation given by Marion County Building Safety Director Mike Savage.

The commissioners asked Savage about the difficulties his department was facing finding qualified personnel to meet the growing needs of the county. Savage indicated that he currently had nine open positions, due mostly to the stringent requirements established by Florida’s Department of Professional Regulations. 

Gold suggested using the excess funds to offer “bonuses” to bring qualified personnel to the county’s building department. 

Savage indicated that despite being short on personnel, inspections are being done timely for the most part; however, on the planning approval process, they’ve had to hire two outside private firms to give support-reviewing plans. 

After working out the kinks, Savage says they are ready to hand over 400 different plans to the outside firms to address the department’s immediate caseload needs.