By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
If Florida is serious about affordable housing, it must get serious about impact fees.
For months, the House had been carrying that water largely alone. House Bill 1139 was moving methodically and quietly through committees while the Senate sat on its hands.
The Senate finally acted. Sort of.
Last week, the Senate Rules Committee approved a sweeping “delete everything” amendment to SB 1566 — a bill originally focused on local government financial transparency — and stuffed into it a significant package of impact fee reforms.
The maneuver is worth noting. Rather than give impact fee reform a standalone bill with its own hearing record and floor debate, the Senate buried it in a transparency omnibus through a late-filed amendment. That’s not how you signal that a policy is a priority. That’s how you check a box.
But the substance matters, and on substance, the amendment moves in the right direction.
What the Senate amendment actually does
Impact fees are the one-time charges cities and counties levy on new construction to fund roads, schools, parks and utilities. In theory, growth pays for growth. In practice, fees have exploded in some jurisdictions — with limited transparency, unpredictable timing, and math that local governments haven’t always been required to show.
The SB 1566 amendment would require that impact fees be grounded in a “demonstrated-need study” using what the bill calls a “plan-based methodology” — localized, current data tied to specific capital projects and projected growth over a defined period. The data can’t be more than four years old. The local government must adopt the study within 12 months if it wants to raise fees.
The amendment also codifies a protection that should go without saying: developers can’t be charged twice for the same transportation impact. When a county and a municipality both want a piece of the same infrastructure cost, they now have to coordinate through an interlocal agreement.
Critically, the amendment creates a new refund and credit process. If a developer overpays (it happens) the local government now has 30 days to respond to a written refund request and 30 days to deliver the refund or credit once elected. That accountability didn’t exist in statute before.
And for local governments that want to blow past the phase-in limits on fee increases? The amendment says they can, but only under “extraordinary circumstances,” only with a unanimous vote of their governing body, only after two publicly noticed workshops dedicated specifically to the extraordinary circumstances question, and only with a demonstrated-need study completed within the past year. That is a meaningful set of guardrails.
What it doesn’t do — and why that matters
No one is eliminating impact fees. The amendment does not zero them out. It does not strip local governments of revenue tools. It says: show your work. Show it with current data. Show it tied to real capital plans. And don’t blindside the market with sudden spikes you can’t defend.
That matters in a state where housing costs are suffocating working families.
Impact fees don’t get headlines. But add $15,000, $20,000 or $30,000 to the cost of a new home, and that invisible policy decision becomes very visible at the closing table. Unpredictability is a tax. When builders don’t know what fees will be six months from now, they price in risk. Risk becomes cost. Cost becomes higher home prices.
This is how decisions made in commission chambers end up pricing teachers, deputies and nurses out of the communities they serve.
Who’s opposing it
Predictably, the Florida Association of Counties and the Florida League of Cities have lined up against measures that constrain local fee authority. Their argument is familiar: local control, infrastructure needs, flexibility.
But here’s the tension.
You cannot hold press conferences about affordable housing and then oppose reforms that bring discipline and transparency to one of the largest local cost drivers embedded in new construction. That’s not a defense of local government. That’s protection of a revenue stream.
If a county or city truly has defensible math behind its impact fees, these reforms should not scare anyone. The requirement is alignment with capital plans and recent data. That’s not a burden. That’s competent governance.
The bigger picture
Florida’s housing crisis is not theoretical. Population growth continues. Construction costs remain elevated. Insurance remains volatile. Land is finite.
You cannot solve that equation while leaving every local cost lever untouched.
The Senate’s decision to move these provisions — even through a side door — is meaningful. But a delete-everything amendment filed late in session, tucked inside a transparency bill, is not the same as the Legislature treating this as a priority.
The question now is whether the House and Senate can reconcile their approaches and get something to the governor’s desk before session ends. HB 1139 and the SB 1566 amendment cover similar ground, but they are not identical. Conference will matter.
If lawmakers are serious about housing supply — not just speeches — the path forward is clear. Reconcile the bills. Pass the reforms. Show the work.
Opposing it, or letting it die in conference, sends a different message: that maintaining fee flexibility for local governments matters more than lowering the structural cost of a home.
Florida’s working families are watching. Even if they don’t know the bill numbers.