Slow-Growth Costs Could Exceed Billion, Study Says

The countywide slow-growth initiative could cost $367 million to $1.44 billion to implement, according to a study by County Administrative Officer Larry Parrish that was delivered to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

But the biggest financial impact of the measure could be a slowdown in development that would hamper the county’s ability to sell revenue bonds backed by developer fees, the 19-page study says.

“Passage of the initiative will impact the ability of the county to finance public facility and infrastructure improvements using bond proceeds,” Parrish’s report said.

Roads, Public Facilities

The costs of implementing the initiative would include construction of roads and public facilities required by the measure, along with the salaries of those who would have to be hired to staff sheriff’s stations, fire stations and the like, according to the study.

They also would include the expense of monitoring enforcement of the initiative’s restrictions on development.

However, the study did not estimate what percentage of the costs of implementing the initiative would be paid by developers and what would be paid by the county.

In fact, the study points out that no funding sources were analyzed.

“Overall,” the report concluded, “the initiative would require that significant new revenue sources be found to comply. . . . Due to both legal and practical constraints, new development cannot pay for all the increased services required by the initiative.”

A previous report issued by Parrish put the cost of implementing the initiative at about $1.3 billion, but he later issued a memo saying that the impact is too difficult to pinpoint without court interpretations of some of the initiative’s provisions.

After a petition drive in which about 96,000 signatures were gathered in an effort to put the slow-growth initiative to a countywide vote, the Board of Supervisors formally decided two weeks ago to place the controversial measure on the June 7 ballot.

The initiative would condition future development on the ability of local roads and public services to handle additional traffic and workloads.

Tom Rogers, co-founder of Orange County Tomorrow, the group that drafted the initiative, said Tuesday that he is not surprised by Parrish’s latest cost figures.

“Once again they are assigning the cost of doing business in the county to the slow-growth initiative, and that’s false attribution. It costs money to provide services, and if we are to have any quality of life in this county, of course it’s going to cost money.”

However, Supervisor Don R. Roth, who opposes the initiative, said Parrish’s report shows that voting for the initiative is “voting for more government” because of the additional staff and salaries that would be necessary to implement the measure.

He also said the report suggests that residents of north Orange County would be paying for improvements required by the initiative that would be made mostly in south Orange County. “The north will be subsidizing the south,” he said.

2 Categories of Costs

Other supervisors could not be reached for comment.

In his report, Parrish said the initiative implementation costs that he identified “consist of additional expenditures where services were not planned to meet initiative standards” and acceleration of expenditures where services already were programmed.

However, the report acknowledged that the initiative does not require the county to upgrade services except where permits are sought by developers for new construction.

Still, Parrish aide Bob Wilson defended the cost estimates, saying that some improvements cannot be charged back to developers because of restrictions under state law on how much a developer can be forced to pay for road construction.

Also, Wilson said, under state law a developer could be charged for construction of a new fire station to meet the initiative’s fire service performance standards, but not for the cost of staffing and equipping the station.