John Willoughby: Greene Publishing, Inc.
A new but temporary ordinance has been adopted during the Madison City Commissioners regular scheduled meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 9, to help the city attract new businesses to the City of Madison.
Proposed Ordinance No. 2017-6 was read in its second reading by County Attorney Tommy Reeves and opened the floor up to public comments, to which there were none. Ordinance No. 2017-6 is an ordinance of the City of Madison, imposing a temporary moratorium, suspending current impact fees for the water and wastewater department. The impact fees are imposed for new connections to the City of Madison's water and water systems.
“The impact fees are a way for the City to [regain] the loss of capacity that its system loses with each customer,” said Reeves. “The impact fees are then held to a separate account. That account is used to increase capacity in the system later on.” Reeves said that the City of Madison has imposed a moratorium in the past for the same reason.
As stated in the Ordinance, the City Commission believes that the impact fees may create an unwanted burden in attracting new business, and that the amount of impact fees collected since the above ordinance was adopted has not been sufficient to effectively justify imposing the impact fees.
The decision to temporarily suspend the impact fees came when the City of Madison received a report from the Florida Rural Water Association regarding the imposed impact fees. The City Commission is in need of time to review the report given in order to conduct their own study regarding the issue to decide to keep and/or adjust the impact fees.
The motion to adopt the ordinance was made by Commissioner Jim Catron, and the motion was seconded by Commissioner Jim Stanley and passed 4-1. Commissioner Judy Townsend voted not to adopt.
The moratorium is scheduled to run until Oct. 1, or until the City Commission decides to repeal the ordinance. During this time, the City of Madison shall not impose impact fees. The ordinance took effect immediately after the second reading on Tuesday, Jan. 9.