It’s Time To Raise Forsyth County’s Low Road Impact Fees
For years High Density Commissioners like Cindy Mills fought against implementing impacts fees for roads. They delayed them as long as possible, bowing to the wishes of big developers. But eventually the dam broke as frustrated residents demanded action and Forsyth finally levied fees about six years ago, after the infrastructure was already stressed due to out of control development.
When the fees were passed, Mills and other Commissioners fought to ensure they remained below the allowed amount with no fees being charged at all for commercial development. The current fee schedule is below:
State law requires an impact fee study to be done prior to implementation, and the study found the current (at that time in 2016) level of service to be 1.61. The County was legally allowed to use a 1.61 or higher level of service to calculate the fees, but under pressure from developers, instead adopted fees at a 1.2 level of service, far below the amount that could legally be levied.
Put simply, this means the impact fees are being collected to maintain a lower level of service than the County had in 2016, and as we can see daily, conditions are deterioriting.
Extrapolating the math from the report, a level of service of 1.61 would result in a fee for single family homes of $7,534.06. The study says a higher level of service could be levied as well, but this would be the fee to maintain (at the time) current conditions. This results in an effective 74% discount to the developers. The report itself had other higher fee options as well that Mills and her then colleagues voted against.
The artificially low fees have resulted in tens of millions of dollars in road construction being paid by existing residents instead of impact fees. Forsyth County has issued over 10,000 single family building permits in the last 5 years, resulting in $55m in missed fee collection.
Always the advocate for developers, Mills and her allies were frustrated at the initial report’s recommended fees, and demanded the study be re-done to account for the 2014 Transportation Bond funding. This lowered the amount of fees to be charged in the calculation as it provided a credit to developers of $100m from the bond, lowering the fees by thousands of dollars per home.
Now, the Transportation Bond money has largely been spent, and the Board has not revisited the calculations as they are allowed under state law, so the rates remain artificially low. Had this been account for, the current low fee of $1968 could be raised to $2,890.50 just by removing the credit applied in 2016 for the bond.
The County has also dropped the ball on the allowed annual CPI/Inflation fee increases, charging the same fees annually for the past six years in conflict of the ordinance stating they “shall” be index adjusted each year.
Finally, after resident Jay Guidry revealed this to Mills on Next Door, the fee for single family homes will increase by $126 in October, less than 7%, far less than inflation increases since 2016. While homeowner property taxes have skyrocketed, development impact fees did not budge a penny, despite the requirement in the ordinance.
Last year, voters narrowly rejected a proposed new one cent T-SPLOST, many of them citing the rampant growth, low impact fees, inflation, and increasing property tax bills. It is quite possible that if allowed impact fees have been collected over the last ten years that the projects in the T-SPLOST list could already be funded as the County has missed out on tens of millions of dollars in funding with either no or low impact fees.
The result of low impact fees are either less roads or higher sales/property taxes — and higher profits for developers.
It is grossly unfair to ask citizens of Forsyth County to conitnue to pay higher and higher taxes, and even to support new taxes, to build infrastructure for builders who have, for years, not been paying their fair share. It’s past time to raise Forsyth County’s low road impact fees.
