Impact fees are a touchy subject in Gilroy these days
– as they ought to be. What’s an impact fee? It’s the costs
incurred, according to the city, for a homeowner to support the
capital costs of city services. Think $30 million police
stations.
Impact fees are a touchy subject in Gilroy these days – as they ought to be. What’s an impact fee? It’s the costs incurred, according to the city, for a homeowner to support the capital costs of city services. Think $30 million police stations.
Currently, the city collects impact fees for police, fire, parks, etc. and uses that money to build facilities. (But don’t tell the people in the Northwest Quad who have been waiting for their neighborhood parks for a decade.)
Anyway, the city administration wants to change the way it does business. It essentially wants to lump impact fees into a single pot and decide what’s important to fund on an ongoing basis.
Though there is some allure to this approach in that it would allow the Council and administration flexibility, there is also grave concern.
We’ve concluded this is a dangerous idea because the city will no longer have to justify the impact fee via category. It’s infinitely easier to rationalize expenses when it’s lumped under a category like “General Impact Fees” as opposed to a very specific fund like “Park Fees.”
If our neighborhood parks, fire stations, sports park and police station were being built in timely and cost effective fashion, perhaps the reaction would be different. But the system is hardly working now and making such a laissez faire change would not encourage more discipline with regards to getting needed projects completed.
City Manager Jay Baksa argues the lump-sum system allows the Council more flexibility. Gilroy doesn’t need more flexibility, it needs more accountability.
Without specific categories tied to specific infrastructure plans, the fees are likely to get lost in a bureaucratic morass. Neighborhood parks that took 10 years to build might take 20. Worse yet, the fees could become political footballs turning attempts at reasonable long-term city planning into squabbles over short-term gains.
But mostly, the city should have to justify the fees.
Besides lumping the fees together, the current proposal would raise the impact fees for a single-family Gilroy home to $48,494. Essentially, everyone who buys a new home can add that cost to the mortgage.
That’s a lot of money per home – and the Home Builder’s Association has a good point when it argues that new homeowners shouldn’t have to bear the full costs associated with new facilities that also benefit residents who have lived here for years.
If the fees are lumped, the task of tracking what’s being spent at City Hall and for what purpose becomes infinitely more complex.
Carte blanche on impact fees is not the way to go and the Council should stop the latest proposal in its tracks.
