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Council debates raising stormwater development‑review cap to $10,000; staff defends cost‑of‑service approach
Summary
Staff presented proposed stormwater development‑review fees for FY27 and recommended a cap near $10,000 to avoid extreme outliers; council members debated whether a cap should exist, whether a schedule or hourly billing would be fairer, and noted the change could slow development.
County stormwater staff presented proposed development‑review fees and explained the recommended structure is intended to align fees with staff time and equipment costs. Staff used recent permit volumes to set a fee schedule and proposed a cap that, under current modeling, would limit extreme examples to $10,000 rather than uncapped per‑acre charges that could yield very large fees for very large sites.
"Let's say you're a 300 acre project that would result in a $60,000 fee...it would be difficult. We were gonna touch that project probably 50 times, have about 200 man hours on that project," staff said to illustrate the rationale for a cap tied to equitable recovery of staff time. Council members questioned whether the cap was too low, suggested removing the cap altogether or using a per‑service billing method and asked staff for examples of past high fees; staff said one recent 355‑acre site could have produced a $71,000 fee under the new structure without a cap, and that the cap intends to avoid unpayable outliers while remaining cost‑based.
Council directed staff to refine the fee‑structure language; no final ordinance text was adopted at the committee level during this discussion.
