INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The Board of County Commissioners today approved hiring outside legal counsel to collect $1.56 million in impact fees staff say the county is owed and long overdue from Village Green Mobile Home Park. The move comes after the county spent seven months wrangling over whether and how to refund other impact fees that were collected but not spent within the statutory time frame.
If it is successful in the effort moved today, the county will more than recoup the money it finally decided to return to island property owners when the board voted last week to disburse all the principle and interest in Fund 101 – approximately $1.2 million.
County Utilities Director Eric Olson said the owners of Village Green have retained legal counsel to fight paying the impact fees, claiming that a statute of limitations governing the matter has expired, releasing them from the obligation.
The brewing legal battle is a replay of an earlier court case in which the county prevailed over the owners of Countryside Mobile Home Park, collecting $356,940 in overdue impact fees.
The original owners of Countryside were also the original owners of Village Green, according to county records.
Both mobile home parks initially had their own water and sewer systems, but later attached to county systems with the understanding impact fees would be collected as lots within the parks were sold and mobile homes established.
However, as the parks were built out the fees were never paid and the matter became complicated by what County Attorney Alan Polackwich called “numerous changes in ownership.”
Olson and Polackwich recommended retaining Michael A. Cohn of the law firm Awerbach & Cohn P.A. to sue Village Green for the $1.56 million because Cohn represented the county successfully in the similar case against Countryside.
“The two cases are so much alike we think this makes sense,” Olson said.
Cohn has agreed to represent the county for a fee of $290 an hour with an upper limit of $30,000 in legal expenses for the case unless additional funds are approved by the Board.
In the earlier case in which $356,940 was collected, legal fees amounted to $52,000.
