IMPACT FEES DESIGNED to bill deep-pocketed developers for streets, parks and government buildings needed to serve their developments are logical, but generate complicated impacts of their own.
For example, utility connection fees high enough to slow in-city growth inevitably spur growth outside cities.
Hook-up fees that run in the thousands of dollars per unit buy only the privilege of connecting.
The owner, builder or developer also gets to pay the cost of installing the physical connection.
Thus, the comparative cost of paying to connect to municipal water and sewer systems, versus the cost of drilling a private water well and installing a septic system on a rural lot, directly affects an individual’s decisions about where he or she will live.
Within the last decade, the Sequim City Council briefly grasped that concept and deliberately dropped hook-up charges to encourage people who were preparing to build in the area to do their building within the city limit.
The council reasoned that encouraging more housing within the city would build customer volume enough to make the city’s water and sewer infrastructure more cost-effective.
Before enough time passed to test that strategy, another consultant report advised that the lowered fees wouldn’t cover system expansion costs.
The council quickly reversed course and hiked the fees.
Sequim isn’t done yet.
Its new council is planning a town forum in February to consider adding four new mitigation fees that could be adopted in March.
Developments tend to go where they pencil, financially and time-wise.
That may help explain why Burke Place Apartments is nearing completion in Forks and will begin moving chronically homeless people off the streets and out of emergency rooms this spring.
A similar project in Port Angeles is still hung up in a traffic study as the city and Habitat for Humanity (no deep pockets there) wrangle over constructing a street.
Dinging developers sounds good, but the end user — whether a homebuyer or espresso stand customer — actually picks up the tab.
And the costs go on.
Last fall, Sequim voters approved a higher sales tax rate, effective since Jan. 1, to pay for street repairs.
It’s too soon to know whether the higher rate will depress sales activity in Sequim, but it immediately burdened business people who work both within and without the city with more complicated tax calculations.
Especially among the self-employed, time is money, so more time spent on paperwork means less time to earn money on which to pay taxes.
Concurrently, the Sequim, Brinnon and Cape Flattery school districts need to replace expiring maintenance and operations levies; the Legislature is in session and feverishly working to increase the amount of money the state removes from the economy; and Congress is energetically loading extra pork on already grandly unaffordable budget-busting government expansions.
Meanwhile, students who desperately need help understanding basic math are choking on algebra, and the United States is said to be lagging in technology.
Calling for a “green revolution,” national columnist Thomas Friedman lauded China for its rapid progress toward building $5 billion worth of solar-thermal power plants using ultra-clean technology developed by eSolar of California [“China Leaps Forward On Energy,” PDN, Jan. 11)
China approved the project in less time than it took the U.S. Department of Energy to complete stage 1 of its application review for a New Mexico power project one-fifth the size that would use the same technology, Friedman reported.
Speeding up regulatory processes to quickly bring good-for-the-environment technology on line in the U.S. isn’t what Friedman advocated as a solution.
Instead, he wants to add a complicated carbon credit Ponzi scheme to the mix.
Fees, taxes and regulations all have their place, but they also have consequences, intended or not, as predicted by what Sir Isaac Newton identified as the third law of physics:
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Which may help explain why impacts always have impacts.
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Martha Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999 and is the secretary of the Republican Women of Clallam County.
She and her husband, Dale, live on a Carlsborg-area farm. Her column appears Fridays.
E-mail her at irelands@olypen.com.
