As the City of San Luis Obispo moves forward on restructuring fees paid by new development, the Chamber urges the City Council to maintain a comprehensive approach guided by community priorities and to allow for the community to review the extensive analysis in order to provide thoughtful input.
“These fees tie directly to getting the things we say we want in our community—better roads, bike lanes, more housing,” Chamber President/CEO Ermina Karim said. “We want to make sure the feasibility of the fees align with achieving key drivers of our quality of life.”
The city’s reliance on new construction to help pay for key community needs has led to a backlog of infrastructure investments. This undertaking to update the fee structure was an important element of the city’s Economic Development Strategic Plan, supported by the Chamber.
However, after years of work by the city, it is now looking to move quickly on an extensive list of new and revised fees that the public has not had adequate time to digest and understand potential implications, Karim said.
The so-called impact fees—charges developers pay to fund infrastructure and facility upgrades related to new projects—came before the Planning Commission last week and are set to be taken up by the City Council at its meeting Tuesday night, with a planned effective date of Jan. 1.
The Chamber recommends that the Council postpone action on these fees to allow for greater community study and input. We believe that implementation for January 1, 2018 does not allow for adequate input. In addition, the Chamber urges that updates to the development impact fees and the water and wastewater capacity and connection fees be done at the same time in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the cumulative impact of these fees to new development, and the feasibility of the impact fees as a whole.
Several new fees are being proposed, including a general government fee for future civic facility space needs like a new City Hall and new fire and police fees for future capital improvements.
By the city staff’s own analysis, the cumulative effect of the proposed fees would make housing, office and retail construction in the south area of San Luis Obispo, where new construction is planned and most likely, infeasible.
The Chamber supports the city’s goals of making the fees more streamlined and transparent, simplifying the many geographical and land-use variations of the current system.
A streamlined fee structure would offer certainty to developers now faced with a raft of nebulous charges but also must maintain feasibility of new projects by capping the burden added to construction costs. Further discussion should wrap in water and wastewater fees also paid by developers to provide a full picture of the fee liability, and how that affects city priorities and goals, such as for housing.
Aiming to preserve development feasibility, the Chamber will be working with its members and other groups to determine a reasonable percentage of project costs to be committed to fees along with suggestions for how to stay within that cap.
Guiding the Chamber’s advocacy is a belief that the costs of community-wide benefits such as parks and transportation infrastructure should be fair and broad based. This dependence has historically led to deferred maintenance and construction of key community needs.
The Chamber urges its members and other interested parties to engage with the issue, support the Chamber’s advocacy efforts and get their voice heard.