Impact fees

[DVD]

I'm looking for some help from California planners and how you do impact fees and maybe general plans. I'm looking into doing a citywide parks impact fee and researching San Diego. I have some questions.

Are all the public facilities financing plans part of some state requirement? San Diego seems to break down each neighborhood.

Does California have any weird limits on impact fees? The point of the citywide impact fee seems to be to take money from the north and build parks in the south. Not something I'm allowed to do in Arizona unless I'm careful in how I word it. I also can't use impact fee money on tiny pocket parks or large regional parks. Just community level parks that have maybe a sports field. Tell me more about this Mitigation Fee Act.

It seems San Diego is allowed to pick who pays the fees. The parks fee is all residential. In our case everyone must pay a share including industrial. They just pay a very small share.

Any comments on how California handles impacts fees would be great. They seem to have a lot more room to run then I do in Arizona.

 

[michaelskis]

Not in CA, but our impact fees are a result of a quantitative determination of the cost of upgrades for Transportation or Parks and Recreation infrastructure based on the content of our master plans. In the Transportation formula, which is being updated as I type, it uses trip generation rates from the ITE manual for development as well as a use factor and a base rate that was determined on improvement costs. The Parks and Recreation Fee is isolated to residential growth (new lots) since the residents are the primary users of the parks system.