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Originally Posted by mikeod
Couple of questions regarding private vs. public.
If a municipality uses federal tax-free bonds to construct something, how does that make it public? Let's say Lady Lake issues bonds to build a pool. Can they not prohibit non-residents from using it? Or say they build a nature trail. Can't they restrict access? I don't see that using federal tax exempt bonds automatically forces an entity to open access to everyone.
Also, a distinction needs to be made regarding cart paths. Those that are completely separate from roadways are maintained with amenity funds. If they are public, why are they not maintained by the tax dollars we pay in addition to our amenity fee? I don't recall a credit on my tax bill for that portion of the amenity fee that goes toward maintenance of those paths. Now, the paths/diamond lanes that are on the surface streets are maintained by the county and funded by tax dollars (property and/or gas taxes). That also applies to roads within the community that have no designated cart lane, but are used by carts as well as autos.....
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If a municipality wants to issue a bond to build a town only pool or recreation center, they will usually issue a taxable municipal bond. There are some exceptions to this called “Tax Exempt Private Activity Bonds” but those are allowed for only a select list of facilities. Private recreational golf cart paths would not be one of those.
See this IRS document for the details.
But the more important issue is that the roads throughout a CDD are supposed to be public, and because the roads in the villages CDDs allow golf cart usage, and are maintained by the county, you cannot have the county forcing these carts onto a private cart path in order to proceed.
Your questions about why the multi-modal paths weren’t being maintained by the individual districts maintenance taxes is an interesting one. Prior to the big 50 million dollar class action settlement quite a few years ago, it was the VCCDD’s position that those paths should in fact be maintained by the numbered districts and not the VCCDD or SLCDD. And at that time, the paths above 466 were deteriorating and too narrow so an upgrade was going to be expensive. Naturally, some of the individual districts squawked about that. The loudest squawkers were of course those districts that had the largest number of paths. So yup, at one point back then even Village residents were bickering with each other over the multi-modal paths.
In the end, the settlement infused some $30 million into the VCCDD and they now maintain the paths on the north side.