St. Johns County Commissioner Sarah Arnold proposed the idea of hosting the town halls during a Tuesday meeting, saying there is a lot of misunderstanding about the referendum in the community.
St. Johns County Commissioner Sarah Arnold called for a series of town hall meetings to discuss the 1-cent sales tax referendum.– Over the next two weeks, St. Johns County plans to host three educational town halls to have a conversation and provide the community with facts about theAccording to the county, the town halls are not to advocate for or against the referendum but rather to provide the public with information and separate fact from fiction.
“I’m astonished at kind of the lack of information and/or the blatant misrepresentation of facts regarding the sales tax initiative that I’m seeing on social media, that I’m hearing from these various community groups,” Arnold said. If approved, the sales tax would be raised from 6.5 to 7.5 cents for the next 10 years and that money would go toward infrastructure, public safety and quality-of-life projects.
The county says right now it has a backlog of about $500 million in infrastructure needs that need addressing as thousands of new residents flock into the area each year.$243 million needed for roads, bridges and transportation infrastructure projects$88 million for five parksBut residents have questioned why developers aren’t the ones footing the bills for the improvements through impact fees.
“Not only are we charging the maximum allowed by law based on our own economic analysis, but we’ve been doing so since 2018 when we raised the impact fees,” Dean continued. “We’re dealing with a backlog. We’re not dealing with future development. We’ve got future development fairly well covered with the impact fees we’ve been charging since 2018.”At the meetings, St.
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