[Advogado]

To sum up: There are only two sources of funds for the new county roads necessitated by the Developer's massive sprawl of The Villages: the Developer, through increasing his present sweetheart impact fee, or the residents, through higher property taxes. The Developer's County Commissioners have chosen the latter.

A few posters seem to argue that we shouldn't care about this because if the Developer's sweetheart impact fee were increased, he would magically pass on his higher cost to the new-home buyers. But think about it. Businesses cannot simply pass on higher costs to their customers. If they could, no business would ever go bankrupt.

Likewise, if the Developer could increase his house prices to cover say a $10,000/house increase in his impact fee without suffering a decline in sales that would more than offset the higher price, he would have already increased his housing prices by $10,000. In effect, what would happen is that, with a realistic impact fee, the Developer would try to increase prices to the extent the market would permit, but would end up taking a profit hit. That is why he has told his County Commissioners to keep his impact fee low.

But to the extent the cost of a realistic impact fee ends up divided between the Developer and the new-home buyers, that should be fine with the current residents of Sumter County. The cost of the infrastructure necessitated by The Villages massive sprawl would then be borne by both the Developer and the buyers of the new houses—exactly the ones who caused the infrastructure expansion, not by the current residents.