| Impact fee ball
in cities' court
By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@TheCitizenNews.com
Fayette County officials this week once again are waiting for action from
city officials concerning impact fees for a new county jail.
Impact fees are levied on new construction to help pay the costs of new
facilities and services made necessary by growth.
County commissioners last week approved the latest plan for charging the
fees after hearing that reaction among city leaders has been positive.
Under the latest plan, developers would have to pay $794.12 for each new
home built, $8,663.12 for each new retail business over 50,000 square
feet in size, $4,331.56 for retail businesses under 50,000 square feet,
and $1,588.24 for non-retail construction such as industries, offices
and churches.
County leaders hope to charge impact fees for the jail as well as for
fire services, but the fire services portion won’t be collected in
Fayetteville and Peachtree City, which have their own fire services.
Now that the county has approved the latest plan, the city governments
must have public hearings and their councils must vote to approve the
plan before it can be sent to the state Department of Community Affairs
for approval.
Peachtree City Mayor Bob Lenox said the new plan looks fine to him, and
it will probably be on a City Council agenda soon. “It’s a structure
we can all live with,” he said.
If the cities sign off on the plan and DCA approves, then local officials
will formalize the plan as an ordinance, which also will have to go through
a round of public hearings at both the county and city levels before the
county can begin collecting the fees.
County commissioners approved charging the impact fees for the jail back
in the spring, with the caveat that all five local cities must agree to
have the fees collected within their borders as well.
City officials agreed “in principle,” but when commissioners
in June approved a mechanism for charging the fees and sent that packet
to the cities for their input, most cities had problems with the specifics.
Fayetteville suggested redoing the plan and charging fees to businesses
and industries as well as residences. When county officials reworked the
figures using both residential and nonresidential sources, officials in
Peachtree City and Tyrone objected to the formula for calculating the
nonresidential fees, saying some industries would pay so much that they
would be discouraged from locating in the city.
A series of negotiations and meetings of a joint county-city study committee
ensued, and a series of new refinements to the plan was shuffled from
the committee to all of the governments and back to the committee for
more refinements.
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