Supervisors Impose Developer Fees to Build Roads Before Homes Go Up

A move to get roads built before homes go up in southeastern Orange County gained momentum Wednesday when the Board of Supervisors adopted a plan to generate money for construction through developer fees.

The supervisors approved a fee schedule ranging from $80 million for the Santa Margarita Co. to as little as $1,560 for an individual property owner wanting to build a home. The fees depend on location and the benefits property owners will derive from the massive road-building program for the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains.

The fees will be levied only on new buildings, not existing developments, and they could be collected as early as today if a property owner obtains a building permit.

In all, an estimated $235 million is to be spent building and improving roads as part of the foothill project.

Adoption of the program allowed the supervisors to scrap interim regulations that barred developers from recording tract maps or getting building permits in the foothill area unless they signed agreements to pay fees yet to be imposed and put up security to guarantee payment. The interim rules were adopted in August to stop developers from hurriedly getting building permits before the fee program was in place.

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez called Wednesday’s action a “great milestone” in the history of what is formally known as the foothill circulation phasing plan, though he noted that several landowners in the foothill area had complained about the fees.

Robert Foresman, owner of a Tustin manufacturing company, told the supervisors that in January he bought property in Rancho Santa Margarita where he hopes to build a 45-employee plant. He said it was not until Aug. 15 that he learned from county officials that his fee under the foothill circulation phasing plan could be as high as $94,473.

“I feel that this, on top of the other fees, is an excessive burden, particularly when it is assessed in a lump sum,” Foresman said.

Cuts in federal and state funds for road-building programs, coupled with restrictions on the ability of counties to increase taxes, have led counties to put the burden of building roads in recent years on developers.

Generally developers have built the roads or paid fees to the county to have them built only as the homes were constructed. If a developer had permission to build 400 homes but actually constructed only 100 and left the rest until later, only a part of the new roadway got built. The remainder was left until the rest of the homes were built.

The phasing program requires that developers pay the fees up front rather than timing road construction to the building of homes.

It took a year of negotiations between the county and 11 major developers who own nearly all the property in the 140-square-mile area to agree on the program and come up with a fee schedule.

Vasquez, whose district includes the foothill area, repeated Wednesday that the program means “no roads, no more building.” The new roads to be built are intended to relieve some of the pressure on Interstate 5, already heavily congested and likely to deteriorate even more if nearly 40,000 new housing units are put up before an extensive new road system is built.