Wednesday, October 4, 2000
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Wednesday, October 4, 2000 |
| Fayetteville
to revisit impact fees Oct. 16 By MONROE
ROARK
The Fayetteville City Council voted Monday night to table the issue of jail impact fees until its Oct. 16 meeting. With two council members absent from the meeting and others wanting some time to consider new figures submitted within the past few days, a slight delay was determined to be in order, since the County Commission will next be acting on this matter at an Oct. 26 meeting. The city is considering, as all of the county's municipalities are, an ordinance to collect fees for a proposed new county jail facility. Impact fees are charged to developers to help cover the costs of new county facilities and services made necessary by growth. A pair of public hearings have recently been conducted to consider amendments in the capital improvements element that must be approved by the Atlanta Regional Commission. Dennis Davenport, one of the county's attorneys, gave a rundown Monday night of the various residential and nonresidential fees and how they break down according to size. The category that concerned council members in previous fee structures was that of retail trade, which had been divided into only two categories, leaving small businesses owners in what they thought was a financially disadvantaged position. A revised setup has a new category for retail establishments under 10,000 square feet. Jail-use equivalency factors also were reworked, with a factor of 1 for the under-10,000 category, a factor of 2 for 10,000-50,000 square feet, and a factor of 3 for those larger than that. Davenport told the council that using the number of employees at each business when figuring the fee would be an iffy proposition, since business owners would know this and adjust their staffs accordingly. For the basic components of the new proposed fee structure, an average of 15 employees is used. Under this system, actual impact fees can range from $4,744 for a small retail center to $14,232 for one of the largest establishments. Using an average of 2.75 people per residential unit, the proposed residential impact fee is $869. Impact fee costs for the facility are being determined by combining two components capital improvement and interest. The capital improvement component recognizes the cost of construction of the facility, while the interest component recognizes the funding mechanism used to pay for the construction, according to documents supplied by Davenport.
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