Historically, Kern County has been one of the lowest cost housing fee areas in the state. Their congressional representatives had been incredibly successful in obtaining federal funding for many of their road projects. This greatly reduced the need to require builders to contribute towards transportation improvements. With a shift in power in congress, the federal pipeline has dried up, and now Kern County is faced with finding ways to fund their transportation impacts.
The conflict noted below is likely a precursor to disputes that will erupt throughout the Valley as cities, counties and homebuilders determine who will pay the bill for future road improvements. Here in San Joaquin County, I've been working with the rest of the City Managers and the County Administrator to find a more reasonable solution than significantly higher fees. Growth in the county for both residential and commercial construction will collapse if we don't find more cost effective ways to address our transportation needs.
We've let traffic engineers dictate development standards over the past half-century. We need to review our methods of analyzing traffic and our tolerable service levels. We spend tens of millions of dollars to ensure that traffic is doesn't get congested for less than an hour a day. During the development boom, we just took the worse case analysis and pushed the burden onto the development projects. We just focused on building more roads and/or widening more lanes and/or adding more traffic signals instead of looking at economical methods for modifying traffic patterns.
It will be interesting to see how the dispute below works out. I would hope that the parties could focus on a mutually beneficial solution instead of protracted litigation.
Conflict Over Traffic Impact Fees Could Prompt Unprecedented Freeze on Development in Kern Couhnty
The following look at developer fees in Kern County and the City of Bakersfield was researched and written for CaliforniaCityNews by
John Frith, a Sacramento-based writer who previously served as chief spokesman for the California Building Industry Association.
The Bakersfield City Council next Wednesday (Aug. 19) is expected to consider actions it could take in response to a lawsuit filed by the local homebuilders association over traffic impact fees – possibly including an apparently unprecedented freeze on processing general plan amendments, zone changes and other steps in the development process.
Homebuilder sources said they had never heard of a California city taking such a drastic step in response to litigation over the ever-controversial process of determining fees charged to builders and developers -– fees that the builders say average about $50,000 per new home statewide.
City Manager Alan Tandy said that contrary to a report in the Bakersfield Californian last week, his office hasn’t yet imposed such a freeze and has not made a final decision on what steps he will recommend to the council. Beyond that, he said he had no comment on specific recommendations he might make to the Council, but confirmed that he expected the Council would indeed consider the issue.
At issue is a decision by the city and the Kern County Board of Supervisors to raise regional traffic impact fees from about $7,000 per home to almost $13,000. The county’s new fee schedule is already in place and the city’s will go into effect on September 7.
Tandy said the fee increase is necessary because traffic mitigation is essential given the proliferation of CEQA lawsuits in the area.
“Our concern is that the community has been subject to increased environmental challenges from a variety of sources, which creates legal problems to processing and approving environmental documents with the premise that traffic mitigation is sufficient,” he said. “It may be that if the HBA was successful in its litigation that we wouldn’t be able to certify that we’ve been able to mitigate traffic impacts.”
While Tandy wouldn’t confirm or deny that a freeze on processing development applications was under consideration, he did acknowledge that the city is concerned about the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday against the city and the county, and is reviewing “the legal issues and alternatives.”
Bob Decker, the executive officer of the Home Builders Association of Kern County, said city officials had warned builders that they might freeze development requests if the HBA went ahead with its suit, but said the main issue from the builders’ perspective is the methodology involved in setting the fee.
“We believe that a fair amount of the fee increase is there to address existing traffic inefficiencies, which is not allowed by law,” Decker said. The so-called “nexus” provisions of state law allow cities and counties to only assess fees to mitigate the impact of new development on infrastructure and services, not to address problems that existed previously.
He also charges that the cost estimates are inflated in today’s market and should be lowered to reflect the cost of building today, not the cost averaged over the past several years.
While development fees in Kern County are lower than many other parts of the state – he said the increased traffic fee would bring the total fee burden to just under $30,000 per home – Decker also said that raising fees in today’s market would make it even more difficult for struggling builders.
“The city says that we’ve put them at jeopardy by filing the suit. We would say that they put the development community at jeopardy when they raised the fee. That’s the issue,” he said.
While a freeze could reduce city revenues from developer fees, Decker noted the impact would be much smaller today than it would have been during the area’s housing boom.
“They probably wouldn’t threaten to shut down (general plan amendments) if they had thousands of applications pending,” he said.
But while a freeze would affect a couple of major development proposals in the pipeline, Decker pointed out that builders have thousands of entitled lots in the region that they will rely on to meet future needs if the freeze actually goes into effect.
Michael “Mick” Pattinson, a Southern California homebuilder who is leading efforts to push back against what builders consider inappropriate and excessive fees, said he thought the city’s response to the HBA lawsuit was short-sighted.
“For a city to charge higher fees and if challenged shut down operations is an outrage,” Pattinson declared. “Cities should recognize the times we live in. Now is the time to slash fees and get construction going. There’s no justification for raising fees when housing is in the worst shape of our lifetimes.”
But Tandy sees the picture differently.
“We went through the boom period, and lots of folks decided to jump into the environmental challenge mode. Now we have fewer documents to be processed, but that doesn’t mean these folks have gone away,” he said.
Labels: Development
