Business community weighs in on proposed mobility fees

Aug 7, 2025 By MEGHAN BRADBURY 7 min read

Industry leaders attending Wednesday’s special Cape Coral City Council meeting agreed that a mobility fee to pay for roadway infrastructure might be better than impact fees but said the city’s proposed levy is too high.

Many who spoke did not believe that the city met the “extraordinary circumstance” requirement for the fee.

In past meetings, city officials said the unforeseen circumstance is that the state legislature changed the dates, but they already had a mobility plan in place and were working to conclude that plan.

The Cape Coral Construction Industry Association opposes the mobility fee as it is currently proposed, although the association is not against such a fee.

The Cape Coral Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Donna Germain also asked the council to reconsider the proposed fee structure from the study, which they find inequitable, overly burdensome and potentially damaging to housing affordability and business growth. Germain said any fees increased should be capped at 12.5% for the next four years.

“Economic development is a mobility solution. It is a core mobility strategy,” Germain said.

City Manager Mike Ilczyszyn told the council that he was looking for consensus, or some form of consensus building among the council where they want the future of the city’s transportation and multimodal network to be.

“All the reports that you have seen, the studies, the presentations, the plans – all these scientific, engineering backgrounds are produced and developed. Those are to help us to make sure what we do is legally defensible under a mobility fee in Florida,” he said.

The mobility fee has four components – roadways and intersections, multimodal plan, transit plan and mobility programs adding. up to a $1.4 billion plan.

Council members all said roadway and intersections should be the first priority. Some shared that there should not be a monovision, that the multimodal plan and mobility programs should also be a priority, but lower.

“One single industry is not going to be bearing 100% of the cost of the plan,” Ilczyszyn said.

He said that the legislature wanted to bring predictability on what such fees are in the future and it was up to council to set the anchor of where the fees would go moving forward.

Ilczyszyn said Wednesday’s special meeting was to find the level of revenue council wanted to collect from growth and match it with their priorities.

“We can look at the growth model – 1,800 to 2,400 permits – per year over the next three years and line the revenues up with the priorities you have during your term. The next council may have different priorities, but where you set the anchor on the fee, they can be limited,” he said.

Ilczyszyn said the No. 1 issue that his administration has heard is keeping up with infrastructure.

“These mobility fees are 100% infrastructure limited. They are restricted revenue and can only go towards infrastructure,” he said.

Every five years the Florida League of Cities surveys the top 10 cities in the state with the same set of questions and priorities of a community to produce a report.

“When the report is complete, they set up meetings with all the 10 cities to show us where our constituents’ responses are different than the norm and standard across the state,” he said.

Two years ago, that survey told the city of Cape Coral that it differs from the rest of the top 10 cities in the state because citizens ranked infrastructure higher than public safety. Ilczyszyn said that showed that they are doing a good job on public safety and can focus on something else – infrastructure, more specifically transportation.

Mayor John Gunter provided some numbers he came up with, which would match Lee County’s fee schedule – residential fee $9,996 per new dwelling unit. Cape Coral’s impact fee, also only on new construction, is $3,347, which is a $6,649 difference that would be split over four years, he said.

“We don’t want to provide any type of sticker shock,” Gunter said.

The increase would be 49.5% in the first year, 33.5% increase in the second year, 25% increase in the third year and a 20% increase the fourth year.

Currently Cape Coral’s impact fee for roads is $3,347, which is within the 15th percentile rank for single-family housing residential detached adopted base fees out of the 14 communities chosen, which ranges from Sarasota County, to urban Hillsborough County, Manatee County, and Charlotte County.

For commercial unit cost per 1000 square feet sits at $5,709 in Cape Coral with a percentile ranking of 0 for the same counties.

Gunter said he would like to see the same fee as Lee County for commercial, $11,476 per 1000 square feet.

“I think it is important that we end up comparable to Lee County, especially commercially, to make sure we are ‘keeping with the Jones.’ If they are looking at Lee County, or us, if our rates are much higher, it can deter that particular developer from coming to Cape Coral. If we hold the line to where Lee County is – it’s better for economic development for the future as well. If we are comparable to them in their rates it will benefit us in the long run.”

Councilmember Keith Long said if looking at the figures of the various counties and looking at the context of when the rates were imposed it is a different correlation with the highest end and the amount of the costs.

“When we look to Lee County to say that is where we want to be, that fee was set in 2018 when things were a hell of a lot cheaper than they are today. It’s a disservice setting that as a height,” he said because they would be implementing a fee that was factored with 2018 costs and services. “We have been lower than all of our counterparts for probably 20 years. When you look at the fruits of that labor, I don’t think we can say that model was working for potential suitors.”

Some council members said they wanted growth to pay for growth.

“For us to just bury our head in the sand and use a target becomes someone else’s number (that was) established in 2018 means something to me,” Councilmember Bill Steinke said.
”Using Lee County as a target is not current reality. We have to hold off the sticker shock – let people ease into it. The use of discounts is a good way to set a number of where it needs to be before we can’t. Set the fee where reality says it needs to be and provide a glide path to get into that.”

As far as commercial goes, Steinke believes that businesses, if they did not come to Cape Coral when the prices were cheap, it does not mean they will not come when new fees becomes a reality.

“They are going to pay the price of admission, I believe,” Steinke said.

Councilmember Rachel Kaduk said when growth does not pay for growth, then all the citizens will pay for that growth.

“I don’t want to kill the growth, either. It has to be appetizing,” she said.

Kaduk said the mobility fee is the highest for her district and they have increases with the fire service assessment, stormwater, solid waste, and the utility expansion project.

“If it is too high in my district, it is choking off growth and then we pay for it,” she said. “The UEP is coming and that continues to go up. I have to fight for my district.”

Kaduk represents District 7, which is the northeast corner of the city, mostly north of Pine Island Road and east of Santa Barbara Boulevard.

To reach MEGHAN BRADBURY, please email news@breezenewspapers.com