Nye County Commissioners Tuesday voted 4-1 to impose a one year moratorium on impact fees and allow a payment system, instead of requiring the entire payment up front.
Ordinance No. 302, the impact fee ordinance, was enacted on Aug. 17, 2005 during the height of the building boom. The bulk of the $1,961 fee for a new residence, $1,298, goes toward streets, another $359 for parks, $167 for fire protection and $137 for police protection.
Businesses pay impact fees on a sliding scale; for traffic impacts they vary from $2.87 per square foot for a shopping center measuring 25,000 square feet or less, up to $1.54 per square foot for a shopping center with 400,000 or more square feet.
The $3.17 million contract to reconstruct Homestead Road is being paid for with street impact fees, but collection of the fees have dropped dramatically with the housing collapse.
Assistant County Manager Pam Webster said the Nye County School District collected only $6,000 last year on its $1,600 residential construction tax which is still in effect.
Nye County Commission Chairman Lorinda Wichman cast the sole dissenting vote, citing the impact on taxpayers outside Pahrump.
“The only way I could vote on that would be if you guarantee me a one year moratorium on the impact. If you don’t, that means if someone wants to build a new hotel or casino in Pahrump, part of the payment for that is coming out of Railroad Valley, Smoky Valley or Tonopah.
”Everybody in Nye county is picking up the cost of helping a company get started. We don’t have the money to go out and build the infrastructure to put everybody into a business. That’s not our business. We are supposed to be looking out for the taxpayers’ money,” Wichman said.
Commissioner Joni Eastley voted with the majority, but had objections. She wanted the bill reviewed by the county’s development attorneys, the law firm of Tyson and Smith, which recommended in 2010 not to suspend the impact fees, because it may create the need to refund fees to people who already paid them and result in a gap in capital improvement funding.
Eastley said, “We don’t want taxpayers to pay to put roads into a development regardless of how many people they are employing.”
Nye County District Attorney Brian Kunzi said, “That’s an absolutely ridiculous proposition to suggest you cannot do away with impact fees once you put them in.”
Commissioner Butch Borasky, who pushed for the ordinance, said there were 17 communities in Florida that enacted moratoriums on impact fees. He made the motion to pass the ordinance, which includes a study on whether impact fees should be higher or lower in different zones.
Commissioner Gary Hollis said the county doesn’t have impact fees elsewhere but also doesn’t enforce building codes, zoning or development agreements outside of Pahrump. He said there are taxpayers paying for infrastructure outside of Pahrump as well.
“I’m for making this countywide myself. If we’re going to pay impact fees in Pahrump we ought to be paying impact fees in Tonopah and everywhere else,” Hollis said.
Hollis said when Nye County enacted zoning, developers didn’t understand it was going to cost them more money to open a business and build a home as well.
Speaking of the original 2005 impact fee ordinance, Hollis said, “We only got into this when the home builders’ association decided they were going to sue us if we didn’t make it everybody having to pay it.”
Wichman said she liked the part of the ordinance that authorized a study on impact fees and the payment plan.
Nye County Interim Development Director Darrell Lacy said the county has been working on ordinances that encourage job growth, a process begun under former county manager Rick Osborne. He said the plan is to give developers a temporary respite from paying impact fees while the county fixes issues within the ordinances to make them more business friendly.
“Our impact fees actually are not out of line with other places. In most respects they’re lower than other jurisdictions in the southern Nevada area,” Lacy said.
Hollis inquired about using development agreements to mandate improvements instead of impact fees. Lacy said development agreements are voluntary. He added smaller businesses and homes don’t normally sign development agreements.
Commissioner Dan Schinhofen said developers still have to pay for traffic studies, flood control and other fees that cost more than impact fees.
Eastley added a caveat after the motion passed.
“Now with the moratorium in place, if there any impacts that are caused as a result of development in Pahrump, that it is made perfectly clear that Nye County is not going to be laying out one penny for roads or any other kind of infrastructure as a result of this development.”
Louis DeCanio spoke in favor of repealing impact fees altogether.
“As soon as you put in the impact fees things started going downhill,” DeCanio said. “We’ve got to give business a reason to come here. It’s that simple.”
“I was born and raised in Chicago and when you went into an area, you opened up a business between the street gang and the Mafia. They tried to extort money from you. That was called a street tax. Basically this is not any different. It’s just a different word for extortion,” DeCanio said.
A couple of thoughts here. First, Gary Hollis said, “When Nye County enacted zoning, developers didn’t understand it was going to cost them more money to open a business and build a home as well.” I don’t believe that. Any developer worth their salt understands the process, unless they are a couple of hayseeds that think development is pitching a tent on the highway and sell junk on a gravel lot. Any developer that has at least a modicum of experience knows they are responsible for not just their development but the impact it has on the surrounding area. If they don’t and are so underfunded that the impact fees put them over the top, then perhaps they should’t be in the development business.
Second, Louis seems to be trapped in a time warp. I can’t speak to how thing went in Chicago, but I am sure the payoffs made to the “street gangs and the Mafia” didn’t really result in any benefits to the developer. Impact fees are to improve the roads and infrastructure that benefit everyone.
So, now the clock starts. Impact fees have been cut back, stand back and watch the flood of developers flow into Pahrump. I’m waiting. A year from now we will know if this experiment worked or if we are all just spitting into the wind.
This entire country was built WITHOUT impact fees and the jobs created with new business generated tax dollars which created a cycle of money which is the engine that runs our economy. Pahrump must become business friendly if we are to survive, because people can’t pay their mortgage or feed their families if they don’t have livable wage jobs. Why is Pahrump the only place in Nye county that has impact fees and why doesn’t Tonopah have impact fees, if commissioners Wichman and Eastley are so worried about the taxpayer footing the bill? Many other towns offer incentives to attract new business, so why would any new business come to Pahrump and pay impact fees? I stated before, when you force someone to pay money to do business in your area, it’s called EXTORTION, the jobs and taxes created by new business is what pays for roads and infrastructure, so why would we change a system that has worked so well in the past?
Development prior to the 50s didn’t include large scale shopping centers, housing tracts and such. Most development came in an already developed area of town, a new building in town or around the corner. It was, in all likelihood, a stand alone structure set apart from others, much like the Dollar store on the corner of Homestead and Gamebird. With the inception of the shopping mall, planned unit developments (like Levittown in New York)communities began to get concerned the existing infrastructure wouldn’t handle the increased flow of traffic, subsequently, municipalities adopted the impact fee structure. Tonopah doesn’t have impact fees because the BOCC hasn’t adopted them for the rest of the county.
Flinging around the term EXTORTION is counter productive the the discussion. Of course you are from Chicago and are probably used to that. Lastly, if a developer is so close on margin that the impact fees put them over the top, they are woefully underfunded and should scale back their dreams. Too many businesses have started up and failed because they didn’t have the capital to see them through.
Check out the history of impact fees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_fee
Speaking the truth is never counter productive and your the one that’s flinging something around. If impact fees are such a great idea, I am sure Tonopah would have had them long before Pahrump. If new single family homes were on minimum 1 acre with well & septic with the exception for apartments and senior citizen communities this could solve many of our problems and still keep Pahrump semi-rural. New business that wants to come to Pahrump which will create livable wage jobs should never be scared off due to impact fees & bureaucracy, because without jobs, the town of Pahrump will fold like a house of cards.
Tonopah isn’t exactly a hotbed of development. Even during the building boom 5 years ago, Tonopah only saw a minute uptick in development. Actually, recently a Dollar store was opened there. As for impact fees there, the County Commissioners decided not to impose those fees anywhere other than Pahrump because there was no significant development proposed or anticipated anywhere other than Pahrump.
People are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts. Believe what you will, but the facts remain the same.
Most (if not all) of the big developers had or have development agreements so this doesn’t matter to them. I don’t really expect to see a flood of business coming in because they did this. This started as the economy started going south, so I do not believe there is a correlation between imposing impact fees and no business coming to Pahrump.
While bouncing my head off the roof of my car as a traverse the horrible state of our infrastructure in Pahrump, i question the logic behind removing impact fees to developers. In another article in today’s paper, Lyon Homes is proudly coming out of bankruptcy. We have neighbors who have fought hard to hook up utilities in another development here. All around us exists the need for infrastructure improvements and new infrastructure, yet we sit on the precipice of an improving economy and builders licking their chops at the prospect of starting new developments in Southern Nevada. The more I’m thinking about this, the less it seems rational for the BCC to have taken this position. Maybe another backroom deal that none of us are aware of.
I am sitting back and waiting for two things. The first is which company will announce a big development that the impact fees won’t apply to. The second is which commissioners accepted a campaign contribution from them. I’m with the other posters on this one. I know what those fees are used for and I believe our community will be the big losers here while another break is given to the big money people who can afford to pay for these impacts– and should.
“Welcome to ImpactFees.com
…a new report finds that Florida counties that reduced their fees have not seen more residential development than counties that did not reduce their fees.”
http://www.impactfees.com/
Let’s just say as a citizen here who lived through the massive invasion of California builders, who invaded Pima County Arizona (Tucson), and took advantage of the lack of adequate impact fees, I’m highly suspicious of this action. Given the opportunity, they will come in here, throw up thousands of homes and apartments, and once completed, retreat to Beverly Hills while the current residents foot the bill for the school, fire station, water, sewer and other build outs necessary for the new inhabitants to join us. If anything, the inpact fees I see in the article were inadequate.
Businesses who come here should come as good neighbors, not with the idea of extortion in mind. And I’m not real thrilled at the prospect of hundreds if not thousands of illegal workers moving in that will be manning the construction jobs.
A development you described would not be allowed in Pahrump without a Development Agreement that would ensure all roads are built to county standards with schools and fire department concerns addressed. A Planned Unit Development comes under a different set of rules than most commercial developments. A tentative map would have to be submitted to the RPC for their approval then it would go to the BOCC for their approval on a final map. Along with that, the developer would have to enter into a Development Agreement with the county. Depending on the size of the development, a large one (such as Mountain Falls) would include roads, utility infrastructure and other requirements.
As for illegals in construction, during the boom here around 2005 there were hundreds here doing framing and concrete work and other tasks. I don’t think the contractors could have kept up without them. This was a time when Las Vegas was building new hotels all over and every Union carpenter and construction worker was employed. The smaller contractors in the outlying areas were taking whomever they could to get the job done. Of course, that was true for nearly everything then.
Dwight, isn’t that what happened here already ?
Nobody seems to be able to report any substantial business that DID NOT come here because of impact fees, of course who came here before them..