Wakulla’s Impact Fee Study: Why Growth Should Pay for Growth

The New Impact Fee Study

In September 2025, Wakulla County released its Impact Fee Study — Final Recommendations. The study, conducted by Kimley-Horn, examined population growth, infrastructure needs, and how the County could use impact fees to make new development pay its fair share.

The study’s findings were clear:

• Wakulla’s population is expected to grow by nearly 9,500 people — about 3,500 new homes — by 2050.

• Growth will stress roads, parks, recreation facilities, and sewer systems.

• Two new fees are recommended: a Recreation Impact Fee and a Mobility (Transportation) Fee.

• Other fees, like wastewater and schools, should be revisited later as needs grow.

Impact fees cannot be used for salaries or maintenance — only for new capital projects directly tied to growth. That means ballfields, boat ramps, sidewalks, road expansions, and sewer lines that serve new residents.

The Taxpayer Burden Today

Here’s the problem: Wakulla has not collected county impact fees since 2011, when Ordinance 2011-1 set the fee collection rate to zero percent. Clerk Revenue Monitoring Reports confirm that for every year since, the County has collected exactly $0 in impact fees.

That policy choice shifted the burden of growth:

• Taxpayers and ratepayers pick up the tab for capital projects through property taxes, sales taxes, and utility bills.

• Homeowners shoulder thousands of dollars in septic-to-sewer conversion costs when their neighborhoods are required to connect.

• Developers pay nothing toward the infrastructure demands created by their projects.

This is why existing residents feel squeezed: growth is happening, but the infrastructure costs are being socialized across the entire community instead of tied to new development.

What We’ve Lost by Waiving Fees

Between 2010 and 2025, Wakulla’s population grew by more than 8,100 people — roughly 3,200 new homes.

If the County had collected even modest impact fees, here’s what we could have banked:

• $2,000 per home = $6.5 million

• $3,000 per home = $9.8 million

• $5,000 per home = $16.3 million

Those are one-time revenues, restricted to capital projects, that could have:

• Accelerated septic-to-sewer conversions

• Built new boat ramps and fields

• Funded road and sidewalk expansions

Instead, the County collected nothing. That gap is why grants, like the $8.3 million DEP award for Wakulla Springs, are stretched thin — they don’t cover the full cost, and taxpayers are left with the bill.

The Sewer Conversion Example

The study projects 3,500 new homes by 2050. If each costs $15,000 to connect from septic to sewer, that’s $52.5 million in needed investment.

Impact fees won’t cover 100% of that, but they can close the gap:

• $3,000 fee × 3,500 homes = $10.5 million (≈20% of total cost)

Pair that with grants and bonding, and suddenly the County has a financing plan that protects residents from skyrocketing taxes or utility rates.

About Those Comparisons…

Kimley-Horn’s report compared Wakulla County to places like Walton, Hernando, Citrus, and Columbia Counties. On paper, that looks fine — they’re all Florida counties with impact fees. But here’s the rub:

• Walton has exploding beachfront tourism revenue — Wakulla doesn’t.

• Hernando and Citrus are sprawling exurban counties tied into Tampa Bay and Orlando — Wakulla isn’t.

• Columbia sits on I-75 with a truck-stop economy — again, not Wakulla.

Trying to map their fee structures onto Wakulla is like comparing a shrimp boat to a cruise ship. It looks good in a consultant’s spreadsheet but falls apart when applied on the ground. Wakulla is uniquely rural, with fragile springs, limited infrastructure, and a tax base that can’t subsidize unchecked growth.

About Kimley-Horn

Kimley-Horn was founded in 1967 in Raleigh, North Carolina, by engineers Bob Kimley, Bill Horn (and later Ed Vick) as a transportation shop. Over the decades it’s ballooned into a nationwide consulting behemoth with 140+ offices and ~9,000 employees. Their playbook is to spin out “best practices” and plug in cookie-cutter fee models — often from places with far different geographies, tax bases, land use pressures, and environmental constraints.

Wakulla’s unique challenges — fragile springs, a limited tax base, septic systems aging under demand, and rural road networks — don’t map cleanly to the beach counties or metro outskirts Kimley-Horn often compares us to. Their fee comparisons to Walton, Hernando, Citrus, or Columbia counties assume Wakulla can absorb the same capital burdens these other counties do — a leap that ignores local fiscal constraints and norms.

And lest we forget: Kimley-Horn is now entrenched in a major lawsuit in Florida. The Fourth District Court of Appeal just reinstated key claims in Antezana v. Kimley-Horn & City of Miramar, after homeowners alleged Kimley-Horn’s negligence contributed to improperly treated (corrosive) water that damaged copper plumbing in over 1,000 homes. That’s a red flag when you’re trusting them to model high-stakes infrastructure costs.

So yes — they’re big, polished, and able to produce politically “safe” reports. But they’re not rooted in Wakulla’s soil. Their lack of local accountability, combined with ongoing legal exposure, means we should treat their numbers and assumptions with skepticism — not reverence.

Kimley-Horn is a national consulting firm with offices scattered across Florida. They are engineers and planners, not locals. They don’t shop in our grocery stores or sit in traffic at the Crawfordville red light. Their job is to crunch numbers and hand the BOCC a legally-defensible report. And they did that. But make no mistake — they are not in the know about Wakulla’s day-to-day realities.

That’s why the comparisons feel tone-deaf. We don’t need a cookie-cutter plan that works for a booming beach county or an interstate hub. We need an impact fee program built around our reality.

Why Impact Fees Are Late — and Urgently Needed

Wakulla is one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida. Yet for over a decade, we’ve let developers build without contributing a dime to public infrastructure. That policy has left taxpayers footing the bill and has delayed needed capital investments.

Closing Thought

Impact fees are not anti-growth. They are pro-fairness. They ensure that those who profit from growth contribute to the infrastructure that makes growth possible — instead of leaving the bill on the kitchen table of every Wakulla taxpayer.