Orange Beach, Ala. - (OBA) - At its council meeting on Tuesday, June 20, the Orange Beach city council will decide if it will hire Duncan Associates for $87,250 to “assist the city in implementing a court-ordered settlement agreement related to the city’s impact fees.”

The city was sued by homeowners Destin and Kim Williams first in August of 2019 and the city had it moved to federal court in January of 2020. It was eventually settled by an order from Judge Scott Taylor in Baldwin County court in June of 2022.

As part of the order, the city was told to revamp the impact fee structure and work with plaintiffs’ attorneys to make improvements in the process and hiring Duncan Associates will fulfill that part of Taylor’s order.

“The city of Orange Beach will diligently and promptly work with Class Counsel to rework the city’s impact fee ordinance to include project-specific factors in order to accord with the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and to reform the city’s accounting and expenditure of impact fee revenues to be explicitly project-related and in accord with the Enabling Act,” Taylor’s order reads. “This revised impact fee ordinance will be submitted to the Court for final approval pursuant to the terms of this settlement. In order to assist this effort, the city will hire an urban planner to be approved by Class Counsel to assist in the development of these changes, which will also include the review of a proposed education impact fee to be applied prospectively.”

Also, in the order, the city was told to pay $1.9 million, including $600,000 to the plaintiff's attorney or about 31.4 percent of the entire settlement. The original plaintiffs, Destin and Kim Williams, received just $5,000 which is about double of the $2,687 they paid to the city in impact fees for the construction of their home on Sampson Avenue, according to the order.

Other expenditures include:

$900,000 as a common fund to be paid to the newly formed Orange Beach Board of Education for the completion of capital improvements to be approved by the Court with an opportunity to object by Class Counsel $400,000 as a common fund to be expended on capital improvements within the city of Orange Beach approved by Class Counsel and this Court

The settlement also gave “substantial injunctive relief, prospectively barring future constitutional, statutory, and common-law violations relative to the city’s reformation of the impact fee ordinance. Such relief in the judgment of the court is considerably valuable, as each year the city collects hundreds of thousands in impact fees, meaning that the injunctive relief in this case is worth, at a minimum, several million dollars.”