Aug. 9, 2009
My, my, my what sharp teeth developers have for the hand that has fed them for so long.
I’m talking about the lawsuit filed by the Home Builders Association of Kern County over the city and county increasing traffic impact fees from $7,343 to $12,870 per single family home outside of the city’s core.
Builders have had it so good around here for so long — absurdly low development fees, few mitigation requirements and a steroidal laissez–faire attitude toward sprawl — they’ve forgotten the dog is actually supposed to wag the tail, not the other way around.
Meaning government (on behalf of the taxpayers) should call the shots on development with regard to where, when and how much it should pay.
Because the tail has been doing most of the wagging in Kern County, our roads can’t handle the traffic they have now.
More development without enough money to keep up roads only compounds the problem.
Unfortunately this we-all-saw-it-coming-but-no-one-did-anything-to-s top-it kind of problem is coming to a head at a terrible economic time.
That is too bad. But the now oft-repeated cry from development standard bearer Roger McIntosh that builders shouldn’t be punished for sins of the past when city and county leaders didn’t have the political huevos to set the fees high enough is patently ridiculous.
It was developers themselves, many the same ones being “punished” today, who fought tooth and nail against fee increases in the past that led to where we are today.
It’s hard to know which party deserves more derision in this little melodrama.
City and county leaders have clearly not done their job over the last 17 years by making sure the traffic impact fee was at the right level for needed road improvements.
I covered the Council when the first fee was introduced in 1992 and well remember the debate. Planners calculated they would need a fee of $6,000 per single family home to keep roads up to snuff while developers pressured council members to get the fee squashed down to $1,179 per home.
Everyone at the time agreed it wouldn’t do the job. But developers were happy, so council members were happy.
The fee got bumped here and there (most notably and after a major fight in 2003, but only up to $6,000 — where it should have been 10 years prior) but it stayed fairly low.
Meanwhile, between 1994 and 2007, builders paved over more than 27 square miles and paid only $130 million in traffic impact fees and built $6 million worth of road projects, according to a Californian analysis done in 2007.
At the time, it was estimated $2 billion was needed to build or improve roads.
That measly $136 million in developer contributions represented only 6.8 percent of the solution when development had clearly created the majority of the need.
It’s no wonder Kern voters spit back the one-half cent transportation sales tax proposal for the third time in 2006. (It certainly didn’t help that developers were some of the most avid promoters of that measure, contributing most of the $767,000 used in that campaign.)
So, no, developers haven’t made the case that they’re being overburdened by local government.
But local government has some ’splaining to do as well.
In particular, the city needs to clean up its act in accounting for how it’s spent traffic impact fees thus far. A handful of loose papers instead of itemized yearly reports is pure hogwash.
And the city’s methodology for calculating the fee seems haphazard as well, going from actual current costs for road widenings, signals, etc. to an average over the last five years.
Neither side is looking very clean on this.
Instead of buckling down and hammering out differences to fix problems, though, we’ve gotta get all lawyered up and start looking for a tree, so to speak.
I’ve said it before and it continues to be true: Development by lawsuit is the Kern County way.
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