Developers Fight Major Fee Hikes of Up to 1,100% : Thousand Oaks: The City Council is considering higher charges for eight of nine departments, from law enforcement to utilities.

Representatives of Ventura County’s building trades are fighting proposed increases of as much as 1,100% in Thousand Oaks building and planning fees.

On Feb. 5, the City Council is scheduled to consider raising fees for eight of nine municipal departments, from law enforcement to utilities.

The most dramatic increases are the Planning Department’s planning and processing fees, said Paul Tryon, executive director of the Building Industry Assn. for Ventura County.

“They are larger in scope than in most of the other communities that we have been involved in recently,” Tryon said. “These seem like such substantial increases that I would like to see some documentation.”

In general, according to a city report, the proposed fees are higher than those in Ventura but lower or equal to those in Oxnard. The city report does not break down how each fee is derived.

Under the plan, 29 of the 32 fees the city charges for planning and processing developers’ applications would increase 25% to 1,100%. Fees for three types of services will remain the same.

The fee for processing a waiver on a parcel map would jump by 1,100%, from $50 to $600. Filing a time extension on a tract map would rise 433%, from $75 to $400.

In other cases, planning fees went from a fixed amount to the cost of the time and materials city employees spend on the application, an open-ended amount that has some developers concerned.

With the recent economic downturn, some developers will find it hard to pay the higher fees, Tryon said.

The last time fees were raised in the Planning Department was in 1981.

Stephen Rubenstein, executive director of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce, said a group of business leaders plan to examine the fees and talk to the city.

Steve Elam, the city’s deputy finance director, said that if the city does not recover costs by charging higher fees, it will have to make cuts in other areas or subsidize the services.

“The increases are definitely needed,” Elam said. “If we don’t implement them, we will continue providing a subsidy, and it will continue to put a strain on the general fund.”

With the fee increases, the amount the city subsidizes the departments would fall from $2.1 million, or 44% of the $4.7-million operating expenses, to about $511,000, or about 11%.

Officials blamed some of the negative reaction on the fact that so many municipal fees are increasing at one time, and that Planning Department fees haven’t increased for the last decade.

Last year, a consultant completed a citywide audit of fees and recommended that they all be revised, Elam said. In the Planning Department, for example, the city recovers only 24% of its costs through fees, subsidizing $719,931 each year.

Elam said the proposed fees reflect costs that were never previously considered. They include, among other things, the costs of operating city vehicles, and of insurance and data processing. The Finance Department will recommend that if the proposed fees are adopted, they be increased every two years.

Mayor Frank Schillo said he supports most of the fee increases and is reluctant to continue subsidizing services indefinitely.

The city will continue to pay for services such as the city library system because residents demand it, he said. The city must make other Thousand Oaks departments bring in revenues to make up for the loss, Schillo said.

“We have to protect our budget. . . . If the fees go up, then that’s what it means,” Schillo said.