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Planning director presents cost‑based review of development fees; council to consider policy tradeoffs
Summary
Planning staff presented a time-and-cost analysis of development-review fees, estimating actual staff labor at roughly $45.70 per hour and showing a range of current fee recovery versus actual cost; staff asked council to provide policy direction on targeted cost-recovery levels and to request the full spreadsheet for review.
The town's planning director briefed council on a comprehensive review of development-fee schedules and actual staff time required to process permits and land‑use applications.
Director Green explained the approach: she calculated staff-hour costs using hourly wages plus benefits for each position, estimated typical task times for each permit type and built a spreadsheet to produce per-application actual-cost estimates. "The average for a planner in our shop is $45.70," Director Green said while presenting the method (Speaker 4). She emphasized the analysis used conservative, routine-case assumptions and excluded high‑work outliers such as applications that generate substantial public controversy.
Green showed a handout that compared the town's current fees (last updated in 2019) against inflation-adjusted figures and the detailed calculated actual costs. Some fees align closely with inflation-adjusted values; others — notably certificate of appropriateness (COA) and certain historic‑district processes — recover a relatively small fraction of estimated cost (COA minor works recovered roughly 16% and COA major works roughly 20% in the handout).
Council discussion focused on public-policy tradeoffs: whether the town should recover a fixed percentage of actual costs (and if so, what percentage), or continue subsidizing work the council views as a public benefit (for example, downtown COA work). Staff suggested that council pick target cost‑recovery guidelines (for example, 50% for most permits while subsidizing priority categories at a lower rate) and then asked staff to return a draft fee schedule reflecting that guidance.
Director Green said the full spreadsheet is available and offered to provide a locked copy for council review; she also noted comparisons with neighboring jurisdictions (Pinehurst, Aberdeen) are included but not perfectly apples-to-apples because of different codes and staffing. Council members agreed they want time to review the detailed spreadsheet and to discuss how fee structure could be used to incentivize or disincentivize certain development types.
