By Staff
Washington’s City Council must give careful consideration to Metropolitan Housing and CDC’s request for the city to pay the impact fees and tap fees for water and sewer services associated with four houses it is building.
Granting that request may not be the thing to do.
Granted, Metropolitan continues to do an excellent job of providing affordable housing to low-income people and first-time homeowners.
Metropolitan plans to build the four houses in the area of West Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Hackney Avenue.
According to the letter, Metropolitan, a nonprofit organization, has no grant money available at this time to pay the fees, which come to $2,356 per house, or $9,424. For a city with a general-fund budget of about $11 million, a $10,000 expense seems relatively small.
It’s not the amount that causes concern. It’s the principle.
Metropolitan is not asking for the fees to be waived. It’s asking the city to pay those fees. Other developers are required to pay those fees. Those developers are in the business of building houses to make money. Those developers, for the most part, don’t have access to grant funds to help them build their houses. Metropolitan doesn’t expect to make money from the sales of the houses. It does hope to break even “in our construction costs and homes sales,” reads Moore’s letter to Smith.
The fees that Metropolitan wants the city to pay are in place to help the city cover its costs of providing services required by growth and development.
By charging those fees, the city helps ensure that developers and the person building his or her house pay their fair share of the costs of providing the services to their projects and houses.
Smith’s memorandum contains a nugget of wisdom the council should use as it considers Metropolitan’s request.
At a time when the city is working to bring its enterprise funds — such as its water and sewer utilities — to the point where they at least break even instead of losing money, even a request by a nonprofit organization such as Metropolitan for the city to pay the fees is a bit too much.
That amount, about the cost of a medium pizza, wouldn’t be an excessive burden on first-time homeowners or low-income homeowners.
When it comes to city services such as water and sewer, everyone should pay their fair share of the cost of providing those services. The city has done and will continue to do much to support affordable-housing programs.
Don’t forget that in 2004 the council approved a request by Metropolitan to waive impact fees associated with a similar project. Metropolitan has benefited from city decisions before.
The city has given much, but there will come times when the city doesn’t have the resources to give as much as it has given. Now is one of those times.
All developers, for-profit and nonprofit alike, should pay the same fees. It’s the fair way to treat them.