I’m sipping a glass of water reinforced with three shots of Echinacea tincture, hoping to be over a nasty case of the flu. I can’t recall the last time I got the flu for Christmas — or at any time of year, for that matter — and the timing wasn’t great, considering my daughter and her five kids had flown down from Alaska for the first family Christmas in eight years.
And it didn’t help that my son and his daughter also came down with the flu and completely missed the gathering of family and friends on Christmas morning…. and the sharing of the Christmas Box… (from which I was able to claim the Echinacea tincture. Thankfully.)
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to write my editorial for this morning, even though I’d done some of the research on Christmas Eve. But I think I can give at least a short introduction here in Part One to the question of Pagosa Fire Protection District “impact fees”.
I heard about the proposal during a presentation by Chief Robert Bertram, to the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners on December 10.
“I’ll give you a brief history. Title 32 Special District are now able to collect impact fee. Previously, we had to rely on the Town and County for impact fees. The County would have to approve it and collect it for us; the Town would have to approve it and collect it for us. And we did have impact fees through the Town — those have since gone away — and we never had them through the County…”
Chief Bertram is correct. Back in 2005, the Pagosa Springs Town government and the Archuleta County government hired consultants Economic and Planning Systems to design an impact fee schedule. Upon release of that report, the Town Council imposed impact fees on new construction within the Town limits — but the BOCC determined that impact fees were a bad idea, and took a pass.
In 2010, the Town Council considered increasing its impact fees, but ultimately declined to do so.
Then, in 2019, the Town repealed its impact fee ordinance and ceased collecting the fees — a portion of which had been provided to the Fire Protection District, the School District, and to the construction of a future Dry Gulch Reservoir.
Last year, the Colorado legislature passed SB24-194, and Governor Polis signed the bill in May. Basically, the law makes amendments to Colorado’s impact fee law, CRS 29-20-104.5, to allow a fire district to impose impact fees without needed the cooperation of their municipal or county government.
So we’re looking at a curious situation here, as we move into 2025.
During the 1990s, Archuleta County had experienced a decade of surprising population growth of about 85% — in increase from 5,345 to 9,898 — almost 5,000 new residents. Our elected and business leaders became concerned that a continuing influx of newcomers was bound to cause reductions in service levels, and began to discuss the idea that “growth should pay for growth”.
Thus, the research into impact fees. Colorado allows a municipal or county government to make new construction pay a special one-time fee to help address future capital expansion of public infrastructure and buildings.
In order to establish the correct fee level, a consultant is typically hired to estimate how much future expansion will need to happen, what it would likely cost, and how much one new home or one new business ought to contribute to meet the future cost.
Meanwhile, the population growth settled down to ‘normal’ levels. The population growth from 2000 to 2010 was 22%. From 2010 to 2020, it was 10%.
The BOCC decided in 2006 that impact fees would have a basically negative effect on the construction industry.
The Town of Pagosa Springs came to the same conclusion in 2019, and repealed its fees.
So my research over the next few days will focus on why our Fire Protection District thinks impact fees might be a good idea, and on how impact fees were misused in the past, and why the consultant’s report that the District is using to set its potential fees seems to me, as an amateur student of local government, law, and taxes, to be just so much garbage. If you don’t mind my language.
We will also look at the amazing growth of the Fire Protection District’s budget.