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Hernando keeps on giving — to big companies that need it least

 
Published June 4, 2015

Our County Commission is at it again — giving a big road-fee break to a rich corporation, and asking us to pick up the slack.

Last year, we got the clearest picture yet that impact fee breaks don't just benefit local builders who whine about them so much it's practically part of their job description.

These breaks also have benefited Burger King, Dick's Sporting Goods and the other corporations that have favored us with their cookie-cutter outlets on State Road 50 in recent years. They've gotten passes on impact fees worth a total of more than a half-million dollars. More like $1.5 million if you count all the recent development along the road, including the expansion of the movie theater and an apartment complex, and use the fee rate established by consulting engineers using court-approved methods — the real cost of adding lanes for all the traffic these big commercial and residential projects generate.

By that same rate, Oak Hill Hospital is now getting a break worth $459,000.

That's for its ongoing expansion, which, the for-profit hospital chain recently announced, will cover not just one floor, but two, and cost $20 million. By the way, this is not to be confused with the hospital's previous expansion, which started in 2011 and for which it received an impact fee break worth $320,000

Yes, Oak Hill's parent company, HCA, will pay more in property taxes because of the addition. It also presumably means that HCA, one of the county's largest private employers, will add jobs.

But the handy thing about Oak Hill and those other, previously mentioned developments, is that they are right on SR 50, so we can also see that growth along a road equals a need for the growth of the road.

After three years of weaving around traffic barrels, drivers can guess that this widening gets expensive, which it does. And though the ongoing $39 million improvement is being paid for by the state, the road still needs another $6.25 million worth of widening at its intersection with Mariner Boulevard. It's just the kind of project that could be paid for with impact fees, and, thanks to the County Commission, just the kind that won't.

Last month, the commission voted to reduce the transportation impact fee to an absurdly low level that has no tie to the future road-building needs — and, of course, it decided not to collect them even at this rate for almost another year.

Three weeks later, acting with a convenient swiftness that made it easy to follow along at home, the commission showed where it intends to find this lost revenue — in our pockets. It got behind the idea of a 3-cent gas tax increase to pay for, among other things, that previously mentioned intersection improvement.

It's not unreasonable to collect road-building taxes from people who use roads. But it's an outright scandal to raise these taxes while not collecting a penny from a company fueling the need for high-cost projects, especially a company such as HCA.

When a Times investigation last year revealed that hospitals were exploiting a law allowing them to tack tens of thousands of dollars onto the bills of helpless trauma patients, it turned out that by far the leading exploiter was HCA. That same year, a comprehensive analysis of hospital costs labeled Oak Hill the 10th most overpriced in the United States.

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A similar survey the year before showed its list prices for common procedures such as treating chest pains and joint-replacement surgeries were far above the state average, in some cases nearly twice as high.

For struggling families, extra pennies for each gallon of gas could mean a little less money for rent, clothes or healthy food.

For HCA, $459,000 means about four hip replacements.

Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.