Maximum Leader Hood takes time to slap down all the happy talk about just how wonderful impact fees would be for Mecklenburg County. Part the scheme’s supposed popularity is a result of constantly pretending that the fees would be paid by developers, rather than passed through to home buyers as is always the case.
As we’ve pointed out relentlessly, a $2,000 or $4,000 even $5,000 impact fee can be smuggled in a couple ways, one being to delete features from a home. And you can bet our local bankers love how these fees are spread out over the length of a 30 year mortgage, unlike an annual property tax bill.
Hood further challenges impact fee supporters to be consistent:
If one were to be serious about this principle, here are policies that make more logical sense:
• Impose a impact fee on all households with school-aged children who move to your county from some other jurisdiction, regardless of whether they buy a new or existing home, or rent.
• Impose an impact fee on each new child brought into a household, either through birth or adoption. Obviously, larger families impact school enrollment more than smaller ones.
• Impose a stiff enrollment fee when parents who seek to enroll their children in public schools cannot provide evidence of legal residence. Illegal immigrants don’t pay as much state and local tax as legal immigrants and citizens pay, so more compensation is needed to offset the cost of educating their children.
• Provide families an impact refund for each school-aged child they keep out of the public-school system — by using charter schools, private education, or homeschooling. Furthermore, any taxpayer who contributes to a scholarship fund for children other than his own attending private schools instead of the public school system would also receive an impact refund.
If you don’t favor these proposals, you don’t really believe in the impact-fee cause as publicly advocated. If the truth be told, politicians and activists favor impact fees because they think they can get away with them easier than a tax increase.
Then there is the oft-ignored fact that new home construction by itself generates more revenue for a jurisdiction, perhaps much more than services for those new homes cost, depending on how efficiently those services are delivered. Here we get to the root of the impact fee fascination: Such fees are yet another revenue stream for local governments, like Char-Meck, which insist on spending without regard to the cost to taxpayers.
Were local officials remotely interested in holding spending increases in line with revenue, we could have about six percent spending growth every year. But the unwillingness to muster up a hint of fiscal discipline means we are on an annual double-digit spending growth treadmill which will always require tax hikes — like impact fees — to sustain.
