City Council - Regular Meeting

Council Workshop, City of Lake City, December 1st, 2025 to order. Uh, and we're going to stand for the pledge and invocation if you will for it stands nationy for all. Please bow your heads. Lord, heavenly father, thank you for another beautiful day in the beautiful city of Lake City. Lord, uh, please bless us with the wisdom that is needed to decipher all the things that this council needs to decipher on this evening. In your name, I pray. Amen. Amen.

Miss Sykes, will you please call the role? Council member Jernigan, present. Council member Harris, here. Council member Young, here. Council member Carter, present. Mayor Walker, present. City Manager Rosenthal, here. The attorney Martin here. Chief Butler. All right. This is this workshop is a continuation of our October 20th, 2025 workshop. And I will now turn it over to you, Mr. Angelo. And he will seed to Miss Lauren Rushing. Pick up where we were.

Good evening, mayor, council members. Uh Lauren Rushing, transportation planner with New Urban Concepts. Um, and as Mayor Walker mentioned, uh, we did have, uh, the first workshop on October 20th of this year, um, where I presented to you all the draft mobility plan for the city of Lake City, uh, some of the recommended projects that are included in that plan, uh, and then discussed, uh, how that plan will serve as the basis for the development of a mobility fee. Um, and so we did run out of time at that workshop, so I've returned this evening to focus on the mobility fee part of this, uh, which is the second part of our scope for this project. All right, and you all have seen this a few times now, but just as a recap and to kind of set the context for this evening's discussion, um, again, a mobility fee is a fee that's only assessed on new growth. So, it's not a a tax on existing residents. It's not an assessment on existing homes. um it is a fee only for new development. So when new development comes into your community, they are expected to have an impact on the transportation system by generating uh new trips. And so this fee is intended to mitigate that uh impact by funding a variety of multimmodal infrastructure uh as well as policies, programs, and services that would support that infrastructure. Um just a quick glimpse back at the mobility plan. Um, so the mobility plan does have about 184 projects in it. Those are roadway projects, multimmoal projects, intersection projects, all on county, city, and state roadways that total an attributable cost of about $136 million. Um, the documentation for that has been provided to you. I know that uh your staff had one-on-one meetings with you all since our last workshop, so hopefully you've had a chance to dig into that a little bit. Um and I am happy to address any other comments, questions or concerns um on the project as a part of uh today's discussion.

Um this graphic here just shows the sevenstep process for implementing the mobility fee. Uh steps one through four are being included as part of our scope. And so step one is to develop the mobility plan. That's the draft of that plan has been presented to you. Um calculate the mobility fee. That's what we'll discuss tonight. and I'll go through the draft fee and those rates with you this evening. Um, if you choose to move forward with adopting the mobility plan and fee, you would need to implement that through an an implementing ordinance. We will help your staff uh develop that. And then Florida statute does uh require that once you adopt the mobility plan and fee within a year of adoption, you need to update your comprehensive plan for consistency and inclusion of the mobility plan and fee and just to uh remove any conflicting language. And so we'll um assist you all with the comprehensive plan amendment as well. Uh after the mobility plan and fee are adopted, we do recommend that your staff develop administration and assessment procedures for collecting and uh expending the mobility fee revenue. Uh we recommend you take a look at your land development code and any site access or impact uh assessment requirements just to make sure those are inconsistency with your plan. Uh and there are no barriers to implementing those projects the way they're intended to be implemented. Uh and then finally, every year as part of your capital improvements program and your budgeting process, you would look at the list of projects in the mobility plan, you would determine which projects you want to prioritize for implementation. Uh then you would look at how much revenue you've collected from mobility fees and you could program that into your budget. Uh this slide just shows the 18step methodology that we use for calculating the mobility fee. Um so after we receive feedback and direction from you all this evening we will update the mobility plan and fee accordingly uh and then we'll take all the data analysis and documentation um and we will provide a mobility fee technical report to you all. Uh this report is what you need to

prove that your mobility fee is consistent with Florida statute. So Florida statute does regulate uh the adoption and the implementation of mobility fees and there are several requirements that you need to meet. One of those being that there needs to be a nexus between um the development that's coming in and the fee that's being charged to them. And so that technical report demonstrates that um and shows that your fee is technically sound. Uh this slide shows the mobility fee schedule. So everything that we have done from this point all boils down into this mobility fee schedule of rates. So this shows you what new development would be charged per the um land use and per the applicable unit of measure. Um this also shows the basic calculation that we use for the mobility fee. Again that will be documented in the technical report. Um but the basic calculation is that we look at um the attributable cost of the mobility plan projects. We also look at the person miles of capacity that would be expected to be added to your transportation network through those projects. And then for each land use, we look at the trip generation which is provided by the IT trip generation manual and that gives you your mobility fee rate. Um, and so we'll go through the schedule together this evening. I'll also provide a few examples of what it would look like if your staff is assessing a particular uh type of land use. Um, but the overall goal with this is that you really want to strike a balance between making sure that you're capturing the full impact of each of those land uses while also streamlining and simplifying the schedule enough that it's easy uh and not cumbersome for your staff to implement. Uh, Florida statute does require that if you adopt a mobility fee, you need to establish an assessment area that would be established through your implementing ordinance. And this is the area where mobility fees can be collected. Uh for a city of Lake City size, we do just recommend one citywide assessment area.

Assessment areas tend to be based on geographic uh locations, uh development types, trip patterns. With a city like Lake City, uh we're recommending that it's best to go with one citywide assessment area. Uh Florida statute also recommends that you establish a benefit district. So that's the area where the fees would be spent. Uh similarly for a city like Lake City that's not huge in terms of land mass uh we're recommending one citywide benefit district um and the reason being if you don't have a real database justification for different benefit districts then it really is better to have one because you have less limitations on where that money can be spent. So if you had multiple benefit districts you would have to spend the money in the same area where that money is collected. And so having one citywide benefit district just allows you to have more flexibility in determining your own process for how you're prioritizing projects for implementation. Um so digging into the schedule itself, these are your residential categories. We're recommending two residential land uses. The first would be um and I apologize, I'm realizing now that the screen is getting cut off a little bit there. Um but we're recommending two residential categories. The first would be an affordable residential. Uh this is a rate that is pre-calculated at the at 50% of your general residential rate. So this is not something that is given by right. This is a tool that's provided by the Florida legislature to address affordable housing. So you can provide a discounted rate or you could outright exempt affordable housing if you should so choose to do so. You would have to establish criteria for what qualifies as affordable housing. So, we've pre-calculated this for you so that when you do establish that criteria if you choose to, you wouldn't have to come back and adjust your mobility fee schedule or change your mobility fee ordinance. It would already be calculated there for you. Um, Florida

statute does allow you to use the statutory definition of affordable housing or you could choose to establish your own criteria as some communities have done. Um, the second category would be just a general streamlined residential land use. So, no matter if you're a single family home, an apartment, a town home, you would pay the same rate um for your residential land use throughout the city. Um lastly, we are recommending that you assess the residential category based on per a per thousand square foot basis versus a dwelling unit. If you look back at some of the old road impact fee schedules, a lot of those used dwelling unit, the industry is kind of moving away from that and going to a per thousand foot basis. probably 95% of the schedules that we've done over the last four years have gone to per thousand square foot. Um, and the reason being because if you're assessing based on dwelling unit, then a 3,000 ft² home is paying the same rate as an,00T home. And we just don't really think that's fair. When you look at the data, um, and we did look at Columbia County Property Appraiser data, the data shows that there's a strong correlation between housing size and the trips that are being generated. So the impact that that unit is having and so um there is there is a database justification for going to square footage. Um and that way if you have if you want to build an 1100T home you would pay a lesser of a fee than a 3,000T home. Um so it addresses affordability and then that's also just in line with how the building industry prices permitting as well. Um these are your institutional uses. So, we're recommending three institutional land uses. Um, that's typical for what we do for most of our schedules. And this has worked pretty well in covering your civic and educational uses. Uh, these are all based on a per thousand square foot basis. Um, so you have your community serving, that would be like your civic clubs, museums, places of worship. Uh,

long-term care is your assisted living or your nursing homes. And then you have private education, which would be things like daycare, after school, uh, prek. Um, for recreational, we're recommending four land uses. We typically do two in most of our schedules, which would be the outdoor commercial recreation and the indoor commercial recreation. Um, in discussions with your staff, they did ask us to carve out golf course, which would be assessed on a per hole basis, and then RV or travel trailer park, which would be assessed on a per space or a per lot basis. Um, the reason being that these may be land uses that you're already seeing a lot of or you think you might see more of in the future, and you want to assess the full impact of those uses. Um, so that was based on staff recommendation. Um for industrial we would like to go with a a streamlined industrial rate. Uh that was again a staff recommendation. Uh sometimes we tend to break out commercial storage which would be like your mini warehouse, self- storage, uh outdoor junkyard. Those um uses tend to have a lower trip generation than other industrial uses. So if you see a lot of that, you may want to break that out. Um but your staff's recommendation was just to do one industrial category. So no matter the industrial type of land use, they would pay the same rate, which would be 550 uh dollars per thousand square feet. Um for office, we're also recommending two categories. You would have one general resident or general office category um and then we break out medical or dental office. And that's just because the medical offices tend to generate about three times more trips um than other types of office uses. So we like to have those separate. Um, and that's why you see their rate being a little bit higher. Um, getting into the retail land uses. So, we are recommending that you aggregate all of your retail uses into these four categories. This would be

your multi-tenant retail, freestanding retail, high impact retail, and then convenience retail. Um, again, if you go back and you look at some of these older road impact fee schedules, it was really common to have like 20 different retail land uses. We don't really think that's necessary because a lot of these land uses tend to generate the same number of trips or a similar number of trips and so their rates end up being very similar. Um, and some of the feedback that we've gotten from other communities we've worked in is that it's residential and retail where you tend to see the most back and forth between your clerks and your applicants kind of arguing about, well, what do we really classify as? Are we this type of retail? Are we that type of retail? We think we should be paying this rate. You think we should be paying this rate? And so we've been asked to go back in updates and streamline those res those retail categories to kind of avoid some of that because it does tend to be very time and resource intensive for your staff. Um and so this is what we would be recommending to to avoid that. Um your multi-tenant retail generates the least amount of trips of your retail uses. Um around 40 trips per thousand square ft per day. Uh freestanding is around 50 to 60 trips per day. High impact would be closer to 100. And then convenience retail is where you're really getting your high impact. Those are in the hundreds of trips per day per thousand square feet. So those would be your fast food restaurants, your gasoline stations, um your more automobile oriented uses. And so that's why you see their fee being much higher than the others. Um and then we get into the non-residential land uses. So that would include your hotel and overnight accommodations. Those are assessed on a per room basis. Um, outside of hotel and overnight, all of the land uses under this category are what we call additive fees. So, they would be charged in addition to the applicable retail land use. Um, so this is kind of a response

to some development trends we've been seeing in recent years where a lot of commercial developments are coming in and they're building smaller and smaller actual buildings and then they're generating more impact by another means. For example, a drive-thru lane. So, three of the uses we have here for drive-through lanes, one is bank, one is fast food, and the other is for retail. Um, a good example of this would be like a Chick-fil-A where as they're building new Chick-fil-As, the actual building itself is getting smaller and smaller, but then the the business has three or four retail drive-thru lanes. Um, and so if you're just assessing on the size of the building, you're not really capturing the full impact of the trips that are being generated from that use. So, they would pay convenience retail for the building itself and then they would pay an additional rate per drive-thru. Um, the retail drive-thru would be for things um like Target, Whole Foods, um, places like that are are experiencing some innovation where they now have drive-thrus themselves. So, you order online and then you go and you pick up your order through the drive-thru. Um, we're seeing a lot of that in South Florida and other communities in Florida. Um, I don't think you have anything like that here in in Lake City yet, but it could be coming. Um, so that's why we included a retail drive-thru. U, we've also included automobile cleaning. So that would be your car washes. They would pay separately for the building and then per lane or stall and plus per five stations uh cleaning stations. Um automobile charging, that's your electric vehicles, automobile fueling, those are your gas stations. So if you had a racetrack come in, they would pay the convenience retail for the building itself. And then they would pay a rate per fueling position. Um and then lastly, we have the automobile repair service. So this would be your tire shops, your mechanics, um vehicle maintenance, and they would pay an additional fee per bay or stall. Um so just to run through a few

examples, if you had someone come into Lake City, they buy a piece of property and they want to build one 2,000 foot single family residential home. Um what you would do is it's on a per thousand basis, so you would do two times the applicable rate, which in this case would be 1776. So, your final fee for a 2,000q foot single family residential home would be $3,552. Um, someone did ask the question if it was an,00 ft home, would they have to pay time 2 since it's above 1,000 square ft? Um, the answer to that is no. What you would do is take 1,100, divide that by a,000. So you'd get 1.1 and it would be 1.1 * 1776 which would be around $1,900 for an,100 ft² home. Uh the second example is for a commercial development. So let's say McDonald's came in. They want to build a 4,000 ft building with one drive-thru. You would do four times the um convenience retail rate, which would be $13,311. they would pay $53,244, but then they would also pay an additional fee for that one drive-thru lane, which would be around $21,000. So, their total mobility fee would be around $74,000. Um, so you can see how the commercial development is really where you're going to be um generating a lot of that mobility fee revenue. Um, and with that, I wanted to keep it short and sweet tonight so we can have plenty of time for discussion and questions. Um, very quickly again, after we receive feedback and direction from you all this evening, we will update the plan and fee accordingly. Um, and then we'll be looking to go to first and second reading sometime in the beginning of next year. Uh, we will also simultaneously be working on that comprehensive plan amendment. So, we would be bringing that before you all as well. Um, and with that, happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Miss Rushing. Does anybody have any questions from the council for Miss Rushing? All right. Doesn't sound like we have any questions right now, Miss Russian. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And with that, I don't believe that there's anything else in this workshop. So, we'll come to a conclusion and we'll see you guys back at our regularly scheduled meeting.