The recent groundbreaking ceremony for the future 5-million square foot Port 460 development provides a good opportunity to remind Suffolk’s decision-makers about why a whole-city Fiscal Impact Analysis needs to be completed before a new comprehensive plan is approved.
After the August 21 City Council Meeting’s public hearing on the 2045 Comprehensive Plan, Mayor Duman made a few comments before City Council voted to delay final action on it. One statement (at Mark 2:59:50) was regarding the Fiscal Impact Analysis (FIA) that was supposed to have been completed:
“I’m not that concerned with a fiscal analysis for the whole city.”
He is not the only person on Council or city staff to feel that this FIA is unnecessary. (We wrote about Comprehensive Planning Manager Keith Cannady’s response in this article.)
However, a FIA is a very important piece of data for a city when considering growth. It details the expected revenue that different development scenarios will bring and the costs of services that the city will have to provide over time. Essentially, it tells you if certain types of growth will likely be: net positive – we make money; net neutral – we break even; or net negative – it will be a fiscal drain on the city.
Mr. Cannady offered two justifications for skipping this crucial step in the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. The first reason is that city planners aren’t changing Suffolk’s current growth approach (which is to just expand the growth area every five years with each new comprehensive plan update). The second reason is that he believes that the site-level FIAs conducted by developers for rezoning applications are sufficient.
A recent example of one of these site-level FIAs is the one provided by the developer (Matan Companies) for the Port 460 rezoning. If you read through the FIA they conducted here, you will see that they include figures for jobs created, tax revenue, and the money they will spend on road construction and improvements. You will also notice there is something missing: Cost of Services. This is the second piece of the equation that would include maintenance for roads, sewers, and storm water drainage, as well as costs for emergency services and other city services. A FIA should not just look at the one-time cost of these services at installation, it is supposed to include costs over time.
Matan claims that they will be spending about $27 million dollars on road construction and improvements. Only $8 million goes to improving existing roads and the remaining $19 million is to create 5 new public roads – which Suffolk and its taxpayers will have to continue to maintain indefinitely. Roads that have non-stop tractor trailer traffic traveling on them are not cheap to maintain! Leaving out the cost of services is NOT a minor detail. It is half of the piece of this puzzle.
We don’t know the answer to how much Port 460 will actually cost taxpayers, because the developer didn’t provide the data and the city didn’t ask!
The City didn’t require an independent third party to conduct or review the fiscal analysis for this huge and impactful project – they simply took the word of the developer as they do with any other ordinary rezoning application.
Is it fiscally responsible to just trust that a developer won’t omit, distort, or fabricate data on a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Mayor himself stated, as he presided over the Port 460 rezoning hearing, that he didn’t believe the accuracy of the claim from Matan when they said that they would be creating 9,000 jobs. He stated:
“I agree, you know, that the number of jobs projected seems pretty high to me. I mean, I’m telling you. I’m… you know… I guess anybody can do a study, but I don’t know where we are getting 9,000 jobs from. I mean, but I’ll take 2,000.” (Source: City Council Meeting, September 21, 2022, at mark 2:08:05)
To rely solely on these site-level FIAs goes against recommendations by experts that a FIA be done during the comprehensive plan process. If the growth approach we have been following is not making the City money, then we want to change it. If there is another way to grow and we can make money and not pave over our farmland, we want to know that, too. Suffolk seems to be blindly going down the path it has been following for decades, but with no data to prove it is a good path.
We go into great length explaining the importance of the FIA and documenting expert opinions in this article. Importantly, the FIA for a comprehensive plan is not conducted by a developer, but instead as a collaboration between the city staff and the comprehensive plan contractor. We shared all of this information with the Mayor and most City Council members. A quick summary is that this FIA allows the city to analyze multiple growth build-out scenarios (3 scenarios were originally a requirement of Suffolk’s contract for the FIA). It can offer comparisons over small or large areas and allow the city to consider the fiscal impacts if certain land is developed as residential or industrial or simply left as agricultural. Our city leaders chose NOT to look at any data on any scenarios. Not only are they skipping this step for this 2045 Comprehensive Plan, it was not done for the 2035 Comprehensive Plan either, which was adopted back in 2015.
The city has been doing decades worth of this type of growth based on no fiscal analysis.
Mayor Duman says he’s not concerned with the FIA. But Suffolk’s citizens ARE concerned. The City is putting the 2045 Comprehensive Plan on hold to complete the Master Transportation Plan, which is very much needed and may demonstrate the need for a lot of expensive projects.
We have been asking since April to hold off on the plan until city staff provides a proper fiscal analysis, as originally required, for the growth that they are proposing. If development in this new comprehensive plan will be so beneficial for the citizens, then there shouldn’t be an issue proving it with an actual FIA. This plan and any future developments should be denied until we know how much it is going to cost us – the taxpayers.