Osceola County commissioners took the right step Monday in moving forward on possibly allowing transportation impact fees to be paid over time as a way to stimulate the local building industry. However, adopting this policy would have financial consequences.

Transportation impact fees are assessed on new residential and commercial development to mitigate the impact of the added traffic on local roadways. While we have very little growth now due to the recession (and few impact fees coming in, for that matter), the county must continue to deal with the leftover congestion generated by the boom times in the not-too-distant past.

Like county commissioners, we could not support a moratorium on transportation or other impact fees, as that would not be fair to all those residents and businesses that had to pay them in the past. One thing that we could support, though, and something that was not brought up at the county commissioners’ workshop Monday, was the option of allowing fee deferral, which is in some ways similar to allowing time payments. In either time payments or deferral, we would fully expect that the county would protect itself financially with liens or secure letters of credit, whichever would be appropriate.

Moving forward with some kind of impact fee relief brings up the issue of how to cover the short-term drop in revenue. A small millage increase would be one way to deal with it or perhaps a sales surtax, as Commissioner Brandon Arrington suggested. Both would work and both are reasonable.

The benefit to the property owner would be reduced up front costs that could be put back into a business. The benefits to the county would be increased building activity and an increased tax base.

We also agree that impact fees should not be the only revenue source to fulfill our commitment to improve the transportation system in our county. We still need to consider some other source of income to do that, possibly a gas tax, which commissioners did not mention Monday.

Another issue is that we are going to be hard-pressed to compete with Orange County in drawing industry to the area south of Lake Nona because our impact fees overall are higher here – 45 percent higher for medical offices, for example. In fact, our overall impact fees are the highest out of Orange, Seminole, Brevard and Lake counties. As a county, we’re going to have to offer some kind of economic development incentive to offset that high cost.