City Council Weighs Fees for New Housing

Faced with proposals to build more than 700 houses in central and eastern Ventura, the City Council is bickering over how much to charge developers for each single-family home that is built.

Developers are offering to pay the city between $2,500 and $5,000 for each new house--a sum that city officials said might not cover the costs of streets, utilities and other amenities within the huge subdivisions.

“There is no standard fee for each house,” said Everett Millais, the city’s community services director. “The fees must be tailored to each specific project.”

The fees do not include standard costs assessed to developers for financing parks, schools and other services that, combined, can add $20,000 or more to the price of a new home.

In previous years, council-approved development agreements have failed to pay fully for new services demanded by sprawling residential projects.

For example, the city spent millions of its own dollars to build the Kimball Road overpass after the development agreements for 721 homes nearby did not cover the $12-million expense.

Not all of the fees--which ran $9,000 for each house--have yet been collected, senior engineer Robert Zastrow said. But without minimal adjustments agreed to every six months, the deals call for developer payments of less than $6.5 million.

“It cost the city millions of dollars to allow those developers to build their houses,” Councilman Gary Tuttle said Tuesday, adding that the overpass would never have been needed without those homes.

Millais asked council members how they want him to proceed in the ongoing negotiations--a move that divided the pro-business and slow-growth factions on the seven-member panel.

“I’m going to line up behind a higher [development fee] than the majority of the council,” Tuttle told his colleagues. “The bottom line is that I would be looking at a real high number.”

But with most of the slow-growth faction ousted in the last election, Tuttle was overruled. The council voted 6 to 1 to direct Millais to begin discussions based on the developer-submitted fee proposals.

“There’s nothing here that restricts staff from going well beyond the numbers,” Mayor Tom Buford said before the council vote.

Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, the top vote-getter in the 1993 election who campaigned on a pro-business platform, said the proposals submitted by the builders are already costly.

“This is a starting number and it is inflated,” Measures said.

Councilman Steve Bennett approved the recommendation, but stipulated that language be added to ensure that unexpected expenses caused by the projects be recovered by the city.

“That might keep it more open-ended,” he said of the fees.

The new projects are proposed by Weston Communities, Beazer Homes and Wittenberg-Livingston Co.

Under the allocations approved last spring, Weston Communities would build 377 homes south of the Santa Paula Freeway just west of the Ventura Freeway. Beazer won rights to build 227 single-family homes on 42 acres at Kimball and Telegraph roads, and Wittenberg-Livingston is negotiating to construct 105 houses east of Saticoy Avenue and north of North Bank Road.

No one at Weston Communities or Wittenberg-Livingston would discuss the developer agreements Tuesday.

But Millais said Weston offered to pay $2,500 for each of its homes. That would generate almost $700,000 to pay for a council-approved pedestrian bridge across the Santa Paula Freeway, The city has already secured $400,000 in state and federal funds to help pay for the $1-million crossing.

Wittenberg-Livingston offered $3,500 per unit or a 12.5-acre parcel that the city could develop as a park. But the council rejected the land offer, saying the city could better use the cash.

Beazer Homes has offered $5,000 for each of the homes it proposes--fees that do not include school, water, sewer or other assessments.

“We know very closely what the entire project is going to cost us,” said Thomas Dee, a vice president at Sylmar-based Beazer Homes. “If we are to pay higher fees, that’s going to be passed on to the home buyer.”

Millais said he would work to obtain the best deals he could.

“In reality, the developers will probably look at any dollars as the ceiling and we’ll probably look at it as the floor,” Millais said. “And we’ll negotiate from there.”