Albemarle County supervisors are wrestling with an interesting question: How much should developers pay the county for new housing to offset the cost of providing government services. The number tentatively agreed upon: $17,000 per single-family home.
The question goes to the heart of the growth-management debate. As Jeremy Borden with the Daily Progress writes, new households mean more children in schools and more drivers on roads. (It also means more people requiring fire, police and rescue services, more people frequenting libraries, and more lawns and parking lots generating more run-off into rivers and streams.) The board came up with $17,000 based on the county’s planned capital projects and comparisons to other counties, including Chesterfield.
Personally, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for developers (who pass on the cost to home owners) to help defray the county’s capital expenses to build new school buildings, police stations, libraries, fire stations and other amenities that the new residents will demand. But I don’t think the Albemarle supervisors are carrying their logic quite far enough.
The cost of providing infrastructure varies widely by project. Some developments are more compact and have more infrastructure-efficient design. Some locations, especially those farthest from existing population centers, cost more to serve than to others. Some, by virtue of proximity to population centers and existing infrastructure, pose only modest new burdens on local government.
Albemarle — and every local government, for that matter — needs to devise a sliding scale in which the proffer or impact fee varies according to the fiscal impact of the development — and the fee needs to apply to all new houses, not just those in projects that require rezoning. As counties take over responsibility for building and maintaining roads, such a sliding-scale proffer/impact fee is all the more crucial. Houses in transportation-efficient communities would incur lower burdens than houses built on 20-acre farmettes. Developers (and, by extension, home buyers) would be rewarded for building (and living in) communities that required less infrastructure investment.
Exacting the same proffer/impact fee from home owners, regardless of the design or location of their community, is just another form of socialism. It helps the local government recover its costs, but it does not encourage infrastructure-efficient design or location.
