PIMA COUNTY MAY be getting serious about impact fees, thanks to Supervisors Raul Grijalva and Dan Eckstrom, who have pushed a developer-friendly bureaucracy to take a hard look at the hidden costs of homebuilding.
County bureaucrats, who have been dragging their feet for 14 months, don't even have a timetable for implementation for impact fees. They are so far in developers' pockets that the impact fee ordinance is being written by county staff and a Florida consultant hired by the Southern Arizona Homebuilders Association, which is kind of like having Al Capone's guy work on the crime bill. Staffers have ignored instructions from the board to include citizen input, so homeowner groups and other real people have been cut out of the loop.
The issue is coming to a head, or you wouldn't have seen homebuilders
explaining how they support impact fees as long as they're
"fair and equitable" on the cover on a recent weekend
edition of the Star and Citizen (in one of those
annoying little advertisements wrapped around the front page
which uses those little dots to detail what desert has been clear-cut).
The fight is over some of the actual cost of development. The board is discussing fees that must be used in specific areas for specific road projects. They have a bureaucratic euphemism for impacted areas: "benefit zones." (Sounds sorta like Bosnian "safe havens.")
What makes SAHBA's "fair and equitable" line insincere is they've already defined it as a "portion" of the actual partial costs. And they're whining about Huckelberry's figure of $3,300 per house and really whining about Grijalva's estimate between $7,000 and $8,000. They're trying to duck out of the paltry $1,000 Oro Valley hit them with by threatening to take it to court.
Cities like Oro Valley have broader powers than counties and Scottsdale recently responded to a suit by SAHBA's counterparts against their $1,000 water impact fee with the threat of a moratorium on building permits, which always gets the attention of both builders and media. That's why Grijalva brought it up--and not only got Eckstrom's support, but a weird vote out of Mike Boyd. Grijalva asked staff to pursue under what conditions a moratorium could be imposed and Boyd, who says he opposes moratoriums, voted to give him the necessary research. And we called Paul Marsh "Dim Bulb."
Developers are going to stall this as long as possible and bluster to keep the fees as low as they can. Every day, they throw up more stuff that avoids fees. The board, at Grijalva's and Eckstrom's prodding, instructed staff to proceed on a definite timeline and include citizen input. A proposal should emerge in the next 90 days.
Meanwhile, SAHBA attorney Si Schorr (who was paid more than $200,000 for those hearings investigating former County Assessor Alan Lang) made a righteously indignant speech about how infrastructure problems are the fault of the community and the politicians for not having foresight to attend to them sooner and we should quit "scapegoating" developers. This guy ought to be on the O.J. defense team claiming Nicole committed suicide. Schorr argues that it's all our fault for not raising taxes to pay for the stuff his clients caused us to need in the first place. Which tells you how sincere his clients really are about being "fair and equitable."
It will take a new board of supervisors and some new state legislators to make impact fees cover the real costs of growth--increased police protection, school budgets and the other expenses that come with growth. California already has fees in the $20,000 to $30,000 range and the courts have upheld them. The issue is simple: Do citizens pay or do builders? The voters can figure that one out pretty easily.
Considering the massive clear-cutting, the over-crowded roads and schools, the spiraling crime rate and the higher taxes all this growth brings us, people may favor the moratorium even more than they do the fees.
