Are elderly care facilities taxed too heavily for their impact on Peachtree City services?

That's the question City Council is asking itself as it studies a detailed report from the Impact Fee Committee.

The primary question, as the committee sees it, is where to draw the line between facilities that provide a heavy concentration of care and services, currently classified as institutional for zoning purposes, and facilities that allow a good deal of independence for their tenants and are classified as residential.

The issue was raised by Councilman Jim Pace at a recent council meeting, when he said that the impact fees charged for assisted living facilities are unfair and all such facilities should be in an office-institutional zoning classification.

“It's patently unfair to those who have lived here for so long to put a whopping tax on them,” Pace said after the committee presented its report at last week's meeting.

While impact fees average $1 or less per square foot for the typical home in Peachtree City, that figure jumps to about $10 per square foot for a room at an assisted living facility, which is often 100 square feet or less. The usual residential impact fee is about $1,400.

Pace has maintained that the city is keeping such facilities away, while they are being built all around the city, when the need is going to become greater as the city's population continues to age.

The importance of elderly care facilities in the city's master plan was spelled out at the beginning of the Impact Fee Committee's report, presented to the City Council by committee member Jim Fulton. The report also stated that such facilities would “assume an increasing importance as the population naturally ages.”

The committee found what it considers an even bigger handicap for elderly care facilities in the fact that they are currently included in the city's moratorium on multifamily development and restricted to two stories in height with ground-level access to both floors.

“The committee recommends that if council wanted to encourage the development of more elderly care units, it should remove these units from the moratorium and also remove the height restriction,” the report stated.

But Mayor Pro Tempore Annie McMenamin suggested that the facilities remain under the moratorium, saying that such facilities are going up everywhere and will eventually reach a saturation level. “Who knows what will happen [in the market] a few years from now?” she asked.

Pace said that the state has a moratorium of its own in place right now, since new facilities are being built only with certificates of need and the state is not issuing any.

Mayor Bob Lenox said that if impact fees are issued, they should be the same across the board.

“Whether a house has 100 square feet or 10,000 square feet, the impact fee is the same,” said Lenox. “To tinker with that opens a Pandora's box that I don't want to get into.”

“Facilities that offer residents support services, but still afford residents a reasonable degree of independence, should be classified as residential uses and subject to impact fee assessments,” the committee report stated.

“Many assisted living facilities include areas for highly dependent Alzheimer's patients,” it continued. “To the extent that living units are specifically earmarked for Alzheimer's patients, the impact fee assessment should be waived. This is clearly an institutional use.”

The committee also felt that it would be “inappropriate” to assess impact fees to nursing homes.

Lenox moved to accept the committee's report, and that motion carried unanimously

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