This letter is about the recent articles and citizen comments regarding fees assessed to developers in Talbot County and the Town of Easton.
I am a business owner and a real estate developer.
Here is the real story. In early 2020, our partnership purchased nine lots in the Easton Technology Center for a total of thirty acres.
In late 2020, we purchased an additional tract of land of 105 acres.
After the two purchases were completed, our partnership owned a total of 135 acres.
A complicating factor is that the land our partnership owns is taxed by both Talbot County and the Town of Easton.
We went through substantial reviews, scrutiny, and planning to get to a point where we could proceed with our project. Before the first shovel of dirt was turned, we had paid $841,773 in impact fees, building permit fees, sewer and water allocation fees, grading permit fees, and state review fees. In addition, we spent approximately $750,000 on engineering fees, legal fees, and architectural fees.
On five of the original nine lots, we constructed four industrial buildings in 2022 and 2023. Three of the four buildings are leased, and the businesses occupying the buildings employ over fifty people. Over the last two years we donated one of the empty buildings for several non-profit events.
In 2022, we proceeded to install utility lines and extend a road on the 105-acre tract at a cost of $2.8 million. As part of the approval process in 2022, our partnership granted an easement to the Town of Easton to install utilities.
Last year, Easton Utilities was able to come onto our property and bore an underground water line to the new regional hospital under construction. They connected to the water line that was part of the $2.8 million utility project that our partnership paid for. The fact that Easton Utilities was able to connect to the water line our partnership paid for most likely saved an additional cost of $3 million to avoid running the water line along Longwoods Road to the hospital. In the end we were happy to help keep the hospital construction costs down.
Now for the best part. In 2020, the year that we purchased the total acreage of 135 acres, the total real estate taxes paid to both Talbot County and the Town of Easton combined were $19,007.
After we constructed the four buildings and installed utility lines, the taxes have escalated dramatically.
Listed below are the total taxes paid to Talbot County and the Town of Easton for the last six years:
2021-2022: $28,934
2022-2023: $111,426
2023-2024: $236,802
2024-2025: $250,275
2025-2026: $264,665
2026-2027: $278,486
I felt compelled to write this letter because the citizens of Talbot County and the Town of Easton should know the true facts.
The debate at the Talbot County Council meeting in July was whether fees assessed to developers should escalate each year automatically without an end. The council members who voted against the automatic increase did the right thing. I am certain that a court challenge would stop the automatic increase and rule it as not legal. If anyone would disagree with me, I am willing to bring a court action to prove my position.
Finally, let me set the record straight: neither Talbot County nor the Town of Easton did not pay a single cent toward our project. As the developer, we paid all costs for the project.
A lack of information is extremely dangerous when citizens do not know the facts.
Scott R. Wagner
St. Michaels
7 Responses
I had thought that the impact fee issue raised by Mr. Naranjo pertained only to a regulatory requirement to adjust relatively modest residential construction impact fees to account for growth in construction costs. Mr.Wagner’s vigorous letter wraps in real property taxes and other charges pertaining to his industrial development. That his investments have enabled a cost saving for the new hospital is commendable. Nevertheless, his deliberate muddling of the record on the residential construction impact fee debate is questionable—as are his grossly disproportionate contributions to certain candidates for County Council.
I wholeheartedly agree that citizens should know all the facts. Not that it will ever happen. Take Trump, please.
But, this is about the cost of government. More people require more services – schools, first responders, traffic control, streets, hospital beds, and on and on. My guess is that the annual budgets of Talbot, Easton, and other local governments are not sufficient to fund new capital infrastructure assets. Oxford had to lay off its police force for lack of funds and contract with the Republican sheriff for law enforcement. The poor town may become a sundown town as a result as of no money for infrastructure. Similarly, I doubt if Talbot County puts aside money every year to fund new school construction.
That is why I’m totally unmoved by the the amount of taxes developers pay. Whatever the number, It probably does not cover the costs they dump on the community. Yes, you pay for the project. As Amazon pays for data centers. But when the lights go dark and there is no water for drinking, the developers are long gone.
Michael,
Your last sentence is a very broad brush. Suggest you draw a distinction between national or regional developers and ones locally, as well as differentiate between a developer and a contractor. In some cases the developer and contractor are the same and, if local, likely provide jobs, have kids in school and are engaged in the community. Yes, to your point, services are essential and municipal governments need the revenue to support infrastructure. Whether the fees are called impact or public service, they are necessary. All construction costs have increased dramatically since COVID and continue thanks to tariffs and the “excursion” in Iran. No trade agreement with Canada will add to the problem. While I suspect the proposed construction cost indexed fee increase is relatively modest in comparison to those costs, it all adds up and ultimately gets passed on to the consumer. The question remains as to what is fair. I hope the County Council will use this opportunity to evaluate the fees. In conversation with elected officials in the Town of Easton, I learned they are reviewing their fees and have even applied to DHCD for grant funding to assist with infrastructure costs associated with upgrading water services needed for sprinkler systems when converting commercial buildings to residences. Kudos to them. The County needs to do the same and also evaluate their fees for residences with a more equitable rate for apartments and a more appropriate fee for a home based on square footage.
Impact fees are set according to a rigorous economic analysis of the specific infrastructure improvements required by the development or the increased capacity necessary for existing infrastructure to maintain the same levels of service based on the increased impacts from the new development. In other words, developers are required to pay for infrastructure required to maintain existing levels of service.
The other option is to either degrade levels of service or have taxpayers absorb the new costs created by the development. These options provide higher rates of return, higher profits, to developers at taxpayer expense.
Taxpayers, all taxpayers, recently have seen both assessed values and tax rates increase substantially.
Development impact fees are direct costs to the public, reimbursed by developers to offset those costs.
Land acquisition, design, engineering, legal fees, planning reviews and approvals, construction costs, insurance, payroll, development impact fees, etc., are all costs of doing business. If the returns, I.e., profits, are not justified by the costs other investment opportunities exist.
Developers gain access to existing community facilities and market that access for profit. The community should recoup the infrastructure costs imposed by the development and development impact fees do just that.
Perhaps develop in Delaware? Looking at that concrete State, developers appear to have Carte Blanche. .
What tears all taxpayers should shed for the poor, poor developers who are being asked to PAY for the infrastructure they required to make their profits. The combined county and town taxes are the lowest in the state. Our schools and infrastructure suffer from unnatural constraints. The idea that a profit-making developer is complaining about a situation that is already skewed highly in its favor is simply another example of those who profit arguing that they deserve yet higher profits. They would prefer that the burden be shifted to ordinary folks, many of whom are living on fixed incomes. The audacity of the complaint astounds.
Mr. Wagner’s Letter Is About Everything Except the Vote:
Scott Wagner has written seven hundred words about his own industrial project — the acreage, the engineering bills, the utility lines, six years of tax assessments — and in all of it he never reaches the question the County Council actually voted on July 14.
So let me put it back on the table.
Talbot County Code § 64-13(C)(1) provides that development impact fees “shall be automatically adjusted to account for inflationary increases in the cost of providing public facilities” using the Engineering News-Record Construction Cost Index. That is not a rate someone dreamed up. It is a measurement. It tracks what it actually costs to build a classroom, a fire station, a mile of road. When those costs rise — and Mr. Wagner’s own defenders in the comment thread insist, correctly, that construction costs have risen sharply — the fee rises with them. If construction costs fell, it would fall too.
Mr. Wagner describes this as an increase that escalates “each year automatically without an end,” and says a court would rule it illegal. He is welcome to that opinion. The ordinance is a matter of public record, and the same sentence he objects to ends by reserving the annual adjustment to the Council “unless the County Council determines an alternate adjustment or waives it.” The Council’s authority to review, alter, or waive the adjustment is written into the law. On July 14 the Council exercised exactly that authority, and the motion to waive failed on a 2–2 vote. Mr. Wagner is calling lawless a process he watched work as written.
Now to his numbers, which are impressive, but . . . beside the point.
The $841,773 he cites is six different categories of charges — impact fees, building permit fees, sewer and water allocation fees, grading permit fees, state review fees — assessed by three different levels of government. He never tells us how much of it was Talbot County impact fees. The $2.8 million he spent on roads and utility lines was private site work, on land he owns and leases to his tenants. Impact fees were never meant to reimburse a developer for his own driveway. They exist to cover something else entirely: the share of county-wide capacity — schools, roads, ambulances, libraries — that new development consumes and that the rest of us would otherwise pay to build.
And yes, his tax bill rose from $19,007 to $278,486. He bought 135 acres of mostly open ground and put four industrial buildings on it. Assessments follow buildings; that is how a property tax works everywhere in Maryland. Those taxes pay teachers, deputies and paramedics — the cost of running the county we already have. Impact fees pay the capital cost of the capacity growth adds. Two different bills for two different jobs, and paying one has never excused anyone from the other.
Mr. Wagner asks for our sympathy on the strength of a tax bill most Talbot families would trade for without blinking.
Then he closes with this: “If anyone would disagree with me, I am willing to bring a court action to prove my position.”
I disagree with him. And voters are entitled to know who is making the offer.
Scott Wagner is the largest donor to the Talbot County Republican Central Committee. He has given it $22,000 since 2023 — $1,000 on May 21, 2023; $2,000 on October 26, 2023; $5,000 on May 23, 2024; $2,000 on December 16, 2025; and $12,000 on June 4, 2026, nineteen days before the primary — with a further $6,000 from his wife, Ms. Tracy Wagner, on April 28, 2025. That is more than twice what the committee’s next-largest donor has given, and it is close to a tenth of everything the committee has raised in four years. Every one of those contributions lists a Pennsylvania address. These are the committee’s own sworn filings with the State Board of Elections, and anyone can look them up.
So: the county’s largest political donor has publicly offered to take Talbot County to court if it keeps adjusting a fee for the price of concrete. Voters can decide for themselves what to make of that.
I will not vote to shift the cost of growth onto the people who already live here. Not through a blanket waiver moved and seconded in minutes with no study, no numbers, and over the finance director’s warning that “existing taxpayers end up subsidizing infrastructure needed for new development.” Not under threat of litigation.
What I will do is get the numbers. If elected, I will move for a nexus study — a real analysis of whether Talbot’s fees actually match the costs growth imposes, whether different kinds of housing pay in proportion to what they demand, and where targeted relief makes sense: for a nonprofit, for affordable housing, for a farmer deeding a homesite to a child. Relief like that is worth doing carefully. It is not an argument for suspending the whole schedule blind.
Mr. Wagner ends by warning that “a lack of information is extremely dangerous when citizens do not know the facts.” On that we agree completely. The relevant fact is one sentence of county code, and it has been public the whole time.
Brian Naranjo
St. Michaels
The writer is a candidate for Talbot County Council.
Sources: Letter to Editor: The Full Cost of Building in Easton — Talbot Spy, Aug. 22, 2026 · Talbot County Code § 64-13, Development Impact Fees · Council Highlights, July 14, 2026 · MD SBE Contributions and Transfers Limits Chart · MDCRIS contributor downloads for Scott Wagner and Tracy Wagner, pulled 08/10/2026 · Talbot County Republican Central Committee campaign finance reports, Entity #05007618: 2019 Annual, 2020 Annual, 2020 Pre-Primary 2, 2023 Annual, 2024 Annual, 2024 Pre-Primary 1 & 2, 2024 Pre-General 1 & 2, 2024 Post-General, 2025 Annual, 2026 Annual, 2026 Pre-Primary 1 & 2, 2026 Pre-General 1