Who Pays for Growth in Collier County, Florida: Part 4
This is the fourth in a five-part series of articles about how new planned development in Southwest Florida’s Collier County perpetuates an insolvent and destructive model of growth, despite the existence of policies that claim to prevent that very problem. Read part three here, and part five here.
Part 4: Who Pays for New Roads?
An arterial road in Collier County. Image via Flickr.
Collier County, Florida's modern history began with a road. When real-estate king Barron Collier bankrolled the completion of the Tamiami Trail in the 1920s, he connected a remote and unforgiving territory inhabited by fewer than 5,000 people to the established city of Tampa to the north, and to the young boomtown of Miami, 100 miles away on the other side of the Everglades. Today, Collier County has nearly 400,000 inhabitants and is known as a resort mecca with the highest per capita income in Florida.
Roads shape our patterns of growth profoundly. They determine which locations are more or less accessible. They define the boundaries of what makes for a reasonable commute. You don't get development in remote locations without first building the roads that make that development viable and marketable.
Yet this common-sense observation is completely disregarded in the way our planning system usually treats roads: not as a cause of development themselves, but merely an accommodation or mitigation to handle the traffic after the fact. The effect is a vicious cycle: development begets traffic, which begets road expansion, which begets development, which begets traffic, ad infinitum. (Or ad conturbauit.) Roads are at the very center of how the suburban pattern of development imposes multi-generational costs that spiral out of control.
If we want to break this doom loop, we need to understand how it works. In the approval process for a massive new development on Collier County's rural fringe, the requirements and assumptions around traffic offer a window into the pernicious logic of the Growth Ponzi Scheme.
Why "Fiscal Neutrality" Rules for Traffic Are Fatally Flawed
Let's step back and establish some context before we look at Collier County specifically. We've already explored in this series how the principle of "fiscal neutrality," though certainly not unique to Florida, is a hallmark of Florida's approach to growth management. The principle is that new development should not increase the tax burden on existing residents, relative to if that development did not occur.
The way this gets applied to roads, though, is fatally flawed. The gist of it is that if new development makes traffic worse on existing roads such that new construction is required to undo the effects, then the developer ought to pay for it. That construction—an "improvement" in the preferred euphemism of traffic engineers—can mean anything from a new turn lane or slip lane, to signalizing an intersection that wasn’t signalized, to adding lanes to a road, to building a whole new road entirely.
It is simply taken as a given that the remedy for congested roads is more road. As long ago as 1955, Lewis Mumford observed that this remedy is akin to treating obesity by loosening your belt. The engineering profession today has yet to absorb the lesson.
The models used in fiscal neutrality studies operate as though traffic is fixed, like a known quantity of water flowing through pipes. They are based on trip generation formulas from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) that provide estimates of the traffic generated by any of a long list of specific land uses. Plug in the use, get the traffic. Plug the traffic into a computer-generated model that automatically distributes it onto roads throughout the region. The effect on congestion on those roads is then quantified by Level of Service (LOS), a measure of the delay experienced by drivers (basically to the exclusion all other considerations or priorities).
The problems with LOS are myriad and warrant their own entire essay, of which many have been written. And the trip generation formulas themselves are infamously pseudoscientific. They are often based on a very small number of real-world studies, and most of those studies were done in suburban-style contexts. Thus the formulas presuppose a world in which nearly all travel happens by car.
Image via Flickr.
The bigger problem, though, is the faulty assumption that traffic is independent of the provision of roads themselves. In reality, traffic is nothing more than the result of humans deciding to drive, and the expansion of roads tends to induce more driving. In the long run, it will cause some people to make decisions such as living farther from work, or traveling longer distances to access shopping and recreation. This in turn makes development of remote sites more marketable, and results in more of it. This whole set of feedback loops, often referred to by the shorthand label "induced demand," is the reason that the number of miles driven per capita in the U.S. has grown by over half since the 1980s.
By requiring developers to "mitigate" the traffic they cause by paying for the expansion of the road network, fiscal neutrality requirements actually exacerbate traffic and add to the burden on taxpayers.
Remember that in Florida, all of these growth management rules and regimes are supposed to “discourage sprawl," according to state law. Among other things, a plan is considered to contribute to "sprawl" if it:
(II) Promotes, allows, or designates significant amounts of urban development to occur in rural areas at substantial distances from existing urban areas while not using undeveloped lands that are available and suitable for development.
(VI) Fails to maximize use of existing public facilities and services.
(VIII) Allows for land use patterns or timing which disproportionately increase the cost in time, money, and energy of providing and maintaining facilities and services.
The system in use in places like Collier County is not a system that "discourages sprawl." This is a system that launders sprawl, giving it the veneer of something orderly and responsible through a lot of talk about mitigating impacts and proactive planning.
The Chicken-Egg Theory of Traffic
Impact fees in Collier County are collected from each new development, yet are failing to cover road costs. In 2018, a proposal for a one-cent surtax was put to voters and passed, in part to cover what was identified as a $114 million shortfall for already planned road projects. The circular, illogical way that the traffic impacts of new development are identified helps explain the problem.
Norm Marshall is the president of Smart Mobility, Inc. and co-leader of the Congress for the New Urbanism project for Transportation Modeling Reform. Marshall analyzed traffic impacts of the three Big Cypress villages on behalf of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, and argues that the $56.5 million in transportation impact fees that Collier Enterprises is set to pay will fall far short of covering a fiscally neutral share of costs for road expansion alone (not including any future maintenance).
Click to view full size. Exhibit shared with the Collier County Planning Commission by Norm Marshall, illustrating the failure of Collier Enterprises to cover all road costs associated with its three villages. Read associated testimony here.
Marshall tallies the shortfall at $125 million. I am not going to delve into the actual calculations to arrive at that number, which involve elaborate mathematical models. (If you are inclined, you can find the details of the discussion by watching Marshall's March 4, 2021, Planning Commission testimony or reading the transcript.)
Instead, let's recognize the underlying game being played here: one that deliberately obscures how having ever more driving is a policy choice, not a law of nature. According to Marshall, there are three ways a developer can lowball their traffic impacts, all of which are being employed in this case:
Assume the roadway capacity will be exceeded with or without the development.
Assume the roadway will be expanded whether or not the development is approved.
Do the traffic calculation wrong in a way that underestimates the impact.
In scenarios one and two, any forecasted problems on a given road are attributed not to the particular new development at issue, but to "background traffic." Because of this, the developer gets to argue that they are not the cause of any need for roadway changes.
But what is "background traffic"? It's simply the preexisting trend on a particular road, extrapolated into the future. If traffic has been growing at, say, 3% per year, "background traffic" is presumed to continue to do so.
Do new cars materialize from the ether each year? No: as Marshall points out (in his Planning Commission testimony beginning on page 82), the reason the traffic has been growing at all is generally new development. So the entire "background traffic" model bakes an assumption of new development into a process whose whole purpose is to decide whether to approve new development.
And while this might be defensible in already built-up parts of the region, where traffic on any given road is coming from many sources and heading to many destinations, it certainly is not so in a currently rural area slated for its first massive suburban communities. The future “background traffic” in the area around the Big Cypress villages is inseparable from the traffic that Collier Enterprises will induce by building the Big Cypress villages. They are one and the same. No development, no traffic.
This makes it curious, to say it politely, to use background traffic, and planned expansions that presuppose it, as an excuse to let Collier Enterprises off the hook. Per Marshall:
[For example,] Oil Well Road is 200 or 300 vehicles per hour now, and the capacity is 800 or 900. And it's not bad. It hasn't been growing much. But the plan is to widen this from two lanes to six lanes this decade. Then they can say, "It's in the long-range plan and, therefore, it's not our responsibility." [But] there would be no reason to widen it without the villages. No reason at all.
Collier County amended its Long Range Transportation Plan in 2018 to add a number of road capacity expansions (not just Oil Well Road) in express anticipation of development in the eastern rural lands. But now that said development is on the table in the form of a concrete proposal, county staff and the developer are arguing that Collier Enterprises should not pay for the expansions, because they were already in the plan.
Chicken, meet egg.
Roads are a Long-Term Money Hole
All of this news only gets worse when you factor in maintenance and eventual replacement.
The devil’s bargain that underlies endless suburban expansion is that, almost universally, a developer like Collier Enterprises pays the up-front cost to build the streets (and pipes, and other infrastructure) internal to their project. They may then deed that infrastructure over to the government. Or they may maintain private ownership through a vehicle like a Community Development District, to which their residents pay annual fees. (These are their own can of worms.) Either way, the maintenance of the road represents an ongoing series of costs that must be paid.
The big lie in almost every municipal budget is the misrepresentation of roads as “assets” when in fact they are liabilities. Roads have ongoing maintenance needs of minor repairs, sweeping, pothole fixes, and so on. Roughly every ten years, they require more significant rehabilitation: a milling and surfacing of the top layer of pavement. Based on maintenance, every 40 to 60 years the road will need to be fully reconstructed. The graphic below visualizes these life-cycle costs (using imprecise average figures for demonstration's sake).
Collier County is aware that transportation revenues have not kept up with road maintenance costs. The county’s own 2020 Annual Update and Inventory Report (AUIR) contains a statement to this effect:
Historical funding for O&M [operations and maintenance] has not addressed industry standards for anticipated life-cycles which are 6 to 8 years for urban roadways and 12 to 15 years for rural roadways. Gas taxes are already at the maximum allowed by statute. Complicating this issue is the reliance on impact fees as directed by our “growth pays for growth” policy which can only be used to add additional capacity or new lane miles to the system. Volatile impact fee rates and revenues alone cannot sustain a multi-year capital program that provides improvements concurrent with the impacts of development.
Click to view full size. Image via Urban3, screen capture from Collier County AUIR.
For the Big Cypress villages, when you project out life-cycle costs, they become dramatically negative. Graphics created by Urban3 illustrate this with regard to the Rivergrass village, looking only at the internal streets. (Impact fees do not apply to streets within the development.)
We can obtain a plausible estimate of the 10-year maintenance cost for the local streets. (We’ll say the maintenance cycle is 10 years to be conservative, even though the quote above indicates 6 to 8.) The Florida Department of Transportation offers estimates for a wide range of roadway types, which presumably reflect Florida-specific climate conditions and materials costs. The closest match to our neighborhood streets is "2-Lane Urban/Suburban Road with 4' Bike Lanes": FDOT tells us to expect a mill and resurface to cost $560,801.27 per mile. For the 16.47 miles of street within Rivergrass, that's about $9.2 million.
We also have an estimate of the taxes Rivergrass is expected to generate, because the developer's economic assessment breaks it down by line item. Once the village is built out, we have about $3 million per year going into Collier County's general fund. Of this, $188,000 per year is marked for the Transportation Operating Fund, which pays for county street maintenance.
It doesn't take a math degree to recognize that $188,000 times 10 is a lot less than $9.2 million. Of course, Rivergrass's taxes aren't earmarked for local streets alone. But if they are not sufficient to cover even the maintenance cost of local streets, we have a big problem. Over multiple maintenance cycles, that problem begins to look like the below "jigsaw" pattern, in which revenues slowly accrue until road maintenance is due. And then we are plunged deep into the red. And then that cycle repeats again and again.
Line-item budget for Rivergrass. Click to view full size.
Click to view full size.
What We Should Measure: Miles Driven, not Congestion
There is an alternative approach to the question, "How much does this development increase the total cost of the road system?" A place like Collier County could choose to model VMT (vehicle miles traveled) instead of LOS (level of service). If they did, the conversations happening in the development review process would look quite different.
If developers had to mitigate increases in VMT, the incentive would be to develop in ways that add the least to total traffic. This would mean building near existing jobs and attractions, not a brand-new town 30 miles away. It would mean seeking good transit connections to new projects. It would mean mixed-use development with genuine walkability, not a strip shopping center on the outskirts of a gated subdivision.
Planners and commissioners would be talking about the fact that residents of the three villages, because of their remote location, will almost certainly have an average trip length well above the already-high county average of 5.88 miles. They'd be hand-wringing over a jobs-to-residents ratio (based on current proposals) of 1:28, as well as the fact that because many of the jobs will be in the service industry, it is unlikely that those holding them will live in the expensive new homes that Collier Enterprises is building. Most will commute from farther away.
Instead, under the current rules, Collier Enterprises gets to sell land to the county at a discount for a brand-new, 4-lane arterial, Big Cypress Parkway, which will act as the spine connecting its own three villages and town center, and pretend it's doing the taxpayers a favor instead of giving them another costly liability.
If the county approves the three Big Cypress developments, it is choosing more traffic and a more expensive transportation system. It is steering growth to the rural fringes of the region and away from areas where there is already infrastructure capacity. And it is committing to roads that will be a long-term financial drain. It could choose not to do these things. But the traffic study methodology is designed to disguise the fact that there is a choice at all, by making the consequences appear inevitable. Death, taxes, and traffic.
Technocratic growth management in Florida has failed, and a new conversation is needed. Let's start that conversation now.