Where did $8 million of Sunny Isles Beach's permitting fees go?

If you have ever pulled a building permit — say, to replace a toilet or enclose a balcony — you paid a fee for it. Under Florida law, that fee is not the city's to spend as it pleases. Section 553.80 of the Florida Statutes says building-permit fees may be used only to enforce the Building Code. The money flows into a restricted fund that cannot subsidize general government, and any surplus must be refunded or used to lower fees. Three years ago, in August 2023, former mayor Norman Edelcup told the Sunny Isles Beach City Commission the fund 'as it stands today is in violation of the state statute,' that the lawful fix was to 'refund that money back to the people who actually paid the fees' and predicted the city would instead make the surplus disappear. He was right. So where did $8 million go? It built a restaurant. The city is spending more than $6 million of your permit fees to renovate a single-story building. Building Department offices on one side, a leased restaurant on the other. Your permit dollars are even paying for its grease trap and gas line. The rent it generates will flow to the general fund, not back to the residents whose fees built it. There is no reading of the statute under which enforcing the Building Code includes plumbing a restaurant's kitchen. And ironically, the city's own portal announces that as of January 2024 permitting is 'fully digital' — apply, pay and track inspections from your phone. Yet it is spending millions on a customer-service building for a department that just went paperless. The money also pays executive salaries. Roughly half the deputy city manager's $200,000 salary is also charged to your permit fees, and last year the city added half of her assistant's. Overseeing citywide operations is the ordinary business of government, not Building Code enforcement. And once this fund is drained to under $100,000, who pays those salaries then? Millions more moved as a 'fee.' Since 2019, more than $10 million has moved from the restricted Building Fund into the general fund as an 'admin fee' the budget files under 'supplies.' It sat flat at $850,000 for four years, jumped 47% in a single year, climbed to $1.6 million — and next year is cut nearly in half, to $818,000. If that charge paid for the cost of serving the building department, it would rise and fall with the department's workload. It does the opposite. It is cut in half for the very year the budget projects the department at its busiest, with demand so high the city is outsourcing inspectors and plan reviewers to keep up. Activity is not falling. The fee is — because the fund it draws from is running dry. Who was supposed to catch this? The city points to its clean annual audits. But an audit only answers the questions it is hired to ask. Our auditors were engaged to test the investment statute and the financial statements — not the building-fee law. The audited report states the fund's restricted balance as a fact; it never asks whether holding that balance breaks the fee cap. That question is outside the audit's scope. Since 2023, I have voted against the city budget over exactly this: an obscure process that asks the Commission to approve figures that pass a paperwork check but fail a common-sense one. Next year's budget comes to a public vote Sept. 8. Before that meeting, I am asking the city to produce an honest reconciliation of the fund against what enforcement costs; reimburse the restaurant build-out and the executive salaries to the fund; stop routing restricted permit fees into the general treasury; and bring permit fees down to what inspection actually costs, as the law requires. Fabiola Stuyvesant is a city commissioner in Sunny Isles Beach and an economist.