Saddleback Trustees Set a $6,200 Fee for Each New Home

Builders of new single-family homes in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District will have to pay a school-development fee of $6,200 per home, the district school board has voted.

The fee for a condominium unit or other type of attached housing will be $3,000.

Hefty increases had been expected. The school board announced in January that it was increasing fees, then $1,200 per unit, to raise money for schools to accommodate the rush of new students brought in by the south Orange County building boom.

The county Board of Supervisors is expected to ratify the higher fees at its meeting Tuesday. New state legislation allows school districts to establish development fees, which county boards of supervisors ratify and pass on to developers.

School board President Raghu Mathur said that the trustees’ vote at a special meeting Thursday night set the higher fee “for the foreseeable future.” He pointed out, however, that the Board of Supervisors had authorized a comprehensive study to see if the fee is too high, too low or just the amount needed to build new schools.

That action by the supervisors last week defused tense relations between developers and the Saddleback Valley school board. The developers, stunned by the school board’s announcement in late January that it proposed to increase its building fee more than 500%, protested that “battle lines were being formed.”

The study of the fee issue was authorized after Supervisor Bruce Nestande suggested the plan.

As part of last week’s compromise, the school district agreed to retain the $1,200 fee on “old” permits for structures stalled during the development-fee controversy in the last stages of being built. Mathur said Friday that the school district forecasts 31,500 new residential structures in the next 15 years. He said the school district is already overcrowded and that new pupils are inadequately housed in portable classrooms.

“We had to move for permanent facilities,” he said. “People are coming to the Saddleback Valley, building beautiful homes in the promised land and then are finding they have no schools to go with those homes.”

Mathur said that the school trustees, as well as the supervisors and the Orange County Building Industry Assn., are seeking permanent solutions to the school-building problem from the Legislature. The state previously provided most of the money needed for building new public schools, but its funding source has been exhausted.