It's not too late to throw your hat into the ring for appointment to a task force to study impact fees in Fayette.

County commissioners plan to appoint nine members to the committee, possibly at their May 27 meeting.

"I'm not sure we need that many people to do that amount of work," said Commissioner Linda Wells during last week's meeting.

State law directs that such a committee have anywhere from five to nine members, and Wells argued for five.

"The larger we get, the more opinions we have to work through to get to a general consensus," she said, pointing out that a task force writing Fayette's sign ordinance took two years to bring the document to the table.

"I would like for us to have the capability of doing it in a timely fashion," she said before casting the only vote against the nine-member panel.

Commissioners want to start charging impact fees taxes charged to developers to help defray the cost of new services and facilities made necessary by their developments as soon as possible. But the state law that provides a framework for impact fees requires that county governments jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops before they can collect the money.

Appointment of the advisory committee is the first step. The group will study the county's plans for capital improvements and make recommendations for which of those could be partially paid for using impact fees.

Fees can be charged to developers to help build new recreation fields, roads or other facilities, or to fund county programs, but only enough to cover the demonstrated impact of a given development on those facilities or programs.

The task force will study Fayette's needs and recommend which programs should be funded using impact fees, and develop the recommended fee structure.

Forty percent of the task force must be made up of developers or representatives of the building trade, and 60 percent must be citizens. Forty percent of nine would be 3.6, so the committee will be made up of five citizens and four developers/builders.

Anyone interested in serving should phone Carol Chandler in the commissioners' office, 770-460-5730, extension 101.