Beware! A Warning for Projects Obtaining Service from the St. Lucie County Water and Wastewater Utility District

If you are considering developing a project in St. Lucie County that will be platted, you should pay close attention to which utility will provide water and sewer service to your property.  If the property will be served by the St. Lucie County Water and Wastewater Utility District, you could be required to make some very expensive purchases of utility capacity prior to recording your plat.  For example, for a recent residential project containing 38 units, we were told that the cost to connect and reserve utility capacity (including various fees), would be almost $370,000, all of which was due and payable before we could record our plat. Our experience with obtaining service from the St. Lucie County Utility District stands in contrast to what would be required if the project was served by one of our other local utilities.  For example, the current policy of the City of Port St. Lucie Utility Department is to allow the developer to purchase capacity one unit at a time, at the time they pull building permits for each unit.  For projects in St. Lucie County that are served by Fort Pierce Utility Authority, you can get your plat approval from the County or the City of Fort Pierce (depending which jurisdiction you are in) if you simply provide a capacity letter from FPUA, certifying that FPUA has sufficient capacity to serve your project.  However, the St. Lucie County Utility District is concerned about not having enough capacity.  The County does not want to approve a platted project and have no capacity available when the lot purchasers come to them to connect to the County’s utility system.  Due to this concern, they will not give you a capacity letter unless you first purchase from them the capacity needed for your entire project and enter into a Utility Agreement.  Therefore, you must purchase the capacity before the County will record the plat.  This situation is made even worse by the fact that it costs almost twice as much to purchase utility capacity from the St. Lucie County Utility District as it costs to purchase it from the City of Port St. Lucie. The County’s policy on this issue has not been consistently enforced in the past.  However, the issue has recently been brought to the attention of the County Planning Department and will likely be consistently enforced in the future.  Therefore, if you have a platted project that requires service from the St. Lucie County Utility District, you should anticipate having to purchase all of your utility capacity prior to recording your plat.