SEQUIM — Randy Young started by telling a roomful of Realtors, builders and other business people that he’s no enemy of the local economy.
“We’re not here preaching. We’re not trying to convince you to do it,” said Young, the contractor hired by Sequim to calculate the impact fees it could charge developers to build here.
Young’s firm, Henderson, Young and Co. of Redmond, produced four studies. They dealt with potential fees to pay for parks, roads, a new city hall and a new police station.
During a public open house Tuesday night, Young faced a skeptical crowd of more than 50 people at the Sequim Transit Center.
These potential charges could add more than $9,000 to the cost of building one single-family home in Sequim; already a building permit totals $15,800.
The contractor forged ahead, though.
These charges are called impact fees because they’re based on the impact of people moving in, Young said.
One new house means an average of 1.92 people going to parks, adding traffic to the streets, calling the police and using all the other services that emanate from City Hall.
The fees aim to make growth — as in the building and real estate industries — pay for growth.
First on Peninsula
If Sequim chooses to charge the fees, it will become the first city on the North Olympic Peninsula to do so — and that fills builders and real estate agents with consternation.
Push the cost of a building permit much higher, impact-fee opponents say, and people will stop coming here. The local economy could shudder to a halt.
Construction, one of this town’s main industries, is already far below what it was during Sequim’s boom years.
In 2005, the city issued 190 permits for single family houses; last year that plummeted to 11.
“Obviously [that’s] a huge reduction because of the nationwide and worldwide and local economy,” City Manager Steve Burkett said.
“There’s concern that adding costs [to building] could delay the economic recovery.”
Young pounced on that concern. Looking at other cities around the state that charge impact fees, as well as those that do not, he noted no correlation between cheap building permits and lots of building activity; nor does he detect a connection between expensive permits and an absence of new construction.
Many factors enter into a home buyer’s decision to move somewhere, Young said.
Quality of life in a community plays a major part, and that’s where impact fees come in.
Fees make a difference
Those thousands of dollars paid by developers, he said, make the difference between alluring parks and shoddy ones; between streets that can or cannot handle the traffic flow; and between ample or inadequate police and city facilities.
The location of a city — between mountains and ocean, say — and the quality of its schools are other factors that can attract people, Young added.
If and when the economy recovers, Sequim’s growth may regain its speed, adding some 2,600 single-family households and more than 4 million square feet of commercial space in the next 20 years, he noted.
The people in those homes and businesses will want places to play, good streets, sewer and water service and police protection.
Questions
When Young invited questions, Kevin Russell of the Clawson Construction spoke up fast.
“What about the human element?” he asked. If $9,000 is added to the cost of a single-family home building permit in Sequim, that will make owning a home impossible for many people.
“There is no affordable housing in Sequim. None. Zero,” Realtor Karen Pritchard added.
To her mind, if the city adopts impact fees, lower-income earners won’t be able to even think about buying a home.
Young responded quickly, saying cities that do charge the fees customarily waive them for builders of affordable housing, such as Habitat for Humanity.
But Bill Humphrey, another longtime Sequim Realtor, said the city is suffering through one of the worst economic crises to ever befall it. Now is not the time, he said, to make housing more expensive.
“I want to be able to sell the beauty,” Humphrey said, “that made me want to move here 13 years ago.”
Young, who had earlier pointed out that cities with impact fees had not seen development come to a standstill, reiterated that the fees could make Sequim even more attractive, by adding to its parks and improving its street system.
“What ultimately will drag our cities’ economies out of the trench,” Young said, “is being a desirable place to live, not a place with cheap lots.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
