Committee moves housing inspection fee ordinance to March after months of debate; council also forwards cost‑recovery directive

The Ithaca City Common Council Committee of the Whole on Feb. 19 advanced an ordinance updating the city’s housing inspection fee schedule to the March 5 voting meeting and passed a companion resolution directing staff to pursue a cost‑recovery approach for residential inspection fees.

City Manager Deb told the committee the change is primarily driven by a planned migration of permitting to the OpenGov online platform and by longstanding inefficiencies in the current system. “The impetus for bringing this to you in the first place was not actually the amount of the fee. It was a way for us to ensure that all of the permits in the building division were being collected in the same fashion,” Deb said, explaining staff’s urgency to complete the OpenGov rollout.

The nut graf: Council spent more than an hour debating whether to adopt staff’s recommended fee schedule now — which officials said would allow the building division to migrate away from an older FileMaker Pro system — or to delay adoption while a consultant produces a comprehensive fee‑study to set a long‑term cost‑recovery policy. The committee voted 7–2 to send the ordinance with staff’s updated fee schedule to the March 5 voting agenda. Separately, a resolution from Alderperson Margaret Fabrizio instructing staff to implement a cost‑recovery model and to review the schedule was approved in committee on a 5–4 vote and will be placed on the…