Road Impact Fees

This will be an interesting meeting. I am hoping to see it or even better, be there. I have a few other priorities at this time.

Since you asked us for our thoughts, I think the road impact fee is way overdue but mostly because of the extremely poor stewardship offered by the commsissioners in granting a zoning change at the drop of a hat to anyone who asked for it without insisting that these pay for themselves. I wish we could sue every former and current board member who did this. Stupidity and gross negligence should not be rewarded. Impact fees, had they been in place to keep pace with development, would not have to be this high. It will now give the appearance of unfairness to those seeking to build in the future. But then. life is fundamentally, unfair. Live with it.

Lily's Lore "I don't ever want to be rescued And I don't ever want to be saved I got a feelin' that I'm gonna be alive forever Dancin' on the edge of a grave..." Jim Steinman

The problem I see here with infrastructure is that there isn’t any, or at least not much. As someone that recently moved here, it seems to me that one of the biggest issues is cost of living. 

No one seems to want to pay the price for infrastructure. The money has to come from somewhere and most people seem to want it to come from the new homes that are built. It just isn’t going to happen. It can’t. Much of it will have to come from some type of taxes. In the battle of tax reform I kept hearing the theme that I’m trapped in my old home because my taxes will go up too much if I lose my SOH exemption.  

Paying higher taxes on a new home is just part of doing business. If you can’t afford the new mortgage, stay where you are. It’s kind of like buying a new car. You can’t keep the car payments on your used 2001 car when you go buy a 2008. You either can afford the new payments or you keep the old car. It’s the same with buying a house. 

One of the issues I see is that too many people want to keep the ‘cheap living’ of the past. The reality is that the reason it is ‘cheap living’ is because wages around here low. The reason wages are low is because it’s ‘cheap living’.  It’s a viscous cycle.  

I know this isn’t California but the fact is that in order to have the road system we want and need we are going to have to be willing to spend the money. A lot of this money has to come from the developments. Read that as increased tax base. Notice I did not say developers. They just pass on the cost to the buyer like any other business. Developments, with their new homes increase the tax base. There is no way that you can have impact fees high enough to pay for everything. 

Under that thought process, in order to pay for roads you need development. In order to have development you need roads. People don’t want development because it increases traffic and takes away from their QOL. Yet they don’t want to pay higher taxes to cover the cost of infrastructure.  

Yet they pass the new tax relief amendment. I think the change in the homestead exemption was a mediocre idea at best. I think the portability capability was one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long time. You just can’t get away with shooting yourself between the eyes too often. 

I’ll try to use some of Baxley’s and Mike Mann’s math here. I’ve lived in my house for 15 years. My SOH assessment is $75K; I just won the Lotto for $15M. Now I like the house I’ve been living in but I sure can afford it so I’m going to buy a new one. 

Now I can do this one of two ways. I can just go buy a new $1M home and keep this one or I can save myself a lot of money by playing by the new rules for property taxes.  I can sell my old home for $300K, buy the new home and because of the portability provision I can still pay taxes on my old $75K assessment. Now the idiot that paid $300K for my old house sold his for $100K. But he had a SOH assessment of only $30K on his old one so no problem. This is not the way to increase your tax base. 

Now my neighbor down the street that moved here from another state is going to pay taxes on the full amount. But hey, that’s his problem. This is the part that scares me. I can see the law suit on this winning and all of us losing because we dipped too deeply into the cookie jar. 

Mike Heemer