It has been over nine months since an advisory panel recommended that Gwinnett County move forward with an impact fee program. Kowtowing to the local development community, Chairman Charles Bannister has to date refused to even give the panel’s report a fair and public hearing.
COVINGTON - Newton County claimed victory in Superior Court Monday in the prolonged battle over its impact fee ordinance with local and state home builders associations.
Superior Court Judge Horace Johnson Jr. dismissed a lawsuit filed against the county by the Newton County Home Builders Association and the Home Builders Association of Georgia, saying the associations failed to meet burden of proof.
The ruling means that the county will move forward with spending the $6.5 million in fees collected so far, said Newton County’s Executive Officer, John Middleton.
County wins impact fee battle
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There is plenty of blame to go around for Gwinnett County’s current financial crisis. You can begin with Wayne Hill and the pro-growth Commissioners who, upon taking office in the early ’90s rescinded the county’s newly-enacted impact fee ordinance, thereby denying the county hundreds of millions in non-tax revenue. You can blame the current Commission Chairman for keeping the fees “off the table” solely to please the development community, despite a positive recommendation by a citizen advisory panel.
You can fault Gwinnett’s state legislators for ignorantly approving tax digest-depressing measures like the value offset exemption, never understanding how the politically-popular tax breaks will ultimately result in higher tax rates for everybody.
You can impute equal fault to the current Commission for failing to capture non-tax revenue sources like impact fees; for failing to aggressively respond to the ever-increasing drain on public services by ineligible recipients; and for continuing to adopt deficient tax rates despite the resultant depletion of the county’s financial resources.
But assigning blame serves no purpose unless the problems, once identified, are resolved. County leadership should immediately take the following steps: Read more…
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On 10/16, the County Commission received the results of a report by the UGA Carl Vinson Institute of Government. The study recommended that a citizen panel be created to accept ethics complaints against county officials.
The AJC article gave no indication that any additional action on this issue is being contemplated by the Commission.
Ethics reform will most likely join impact fees on the growing pile of issues on which the Commission is currently dragging its feet.
In mid-April, a citizen advisory committee completed a study of impact fees. After a year of study, the group recommended that the county charge the fees to offset the cost of infrastructure to serve new growth. To date, the committee has not even been asked to formally present its report to the Commission; much less has the Commission acted on any of the committee’s recommendations.
Most likely, the upcoming Commission elections (including a contentious race for Chairman) have caused a degree of `political paralysis.` This makes no sense to me– surveys show that impact fees are very popular with the voters– except that they are unpopular with the development community, which funnels big bucks into the candidates’ campaign coffers.
Don’t let the developers buy time on such an important issue. Tens of millions of dollars have been lost ever since the previous Chairman rescinded Gwinnett’s first impact fee program in the early 1990’s. There is no reason why the current Commission should delay a day longer.
Contact the County Commission today and demand that they take action on impact fees by sending a single email to commishes@aboutgwinnett.com.
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