HBAR Government Affairs Updates
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Chesterfield Takes In All Ideas To Reduce Development Costs
Engineers and developers met with county officials for two hours Tuesday to provide ideas for helping Chesterfield bring down its cost of development, including doing something to reduce the cash proffer.
The county is experiencing a revenue shortfall this fiscal year of close to $80 million, and will have to cut essential services from its FY 2010-11 general fund and school budgets. County supervisors have been told that at its current revenue collection pace, Chesterfield may experience revenue shortfalls for as much as the next five years.
County administrator Jay Stegmaier, in a memo to the building industry in February, asked for advice to reduce development costs in the hope of jump starting a residential building industry that could help fill some of the shortfall. Chesterfield builders were issued fewer than 700 single-family detached (SFD) building permits in 2009, compared to almost 2,200 SFD permits just four years earlier.
HBAR, with the help of several member engineering and builder firms, has provided the county with a list of 22 different initiatives the county could take that would lower costs. A copy of the letter is available on the archives page of the HBAR website. HBAR has also asked the county to reconsider creating a task force to review the county’s building and development codes line-by-line to extract as much extraneous cost as possible from county regulations. A similar request made in spring 2009 was rejected by county officials.
Tuesday county planners heard a number of ideas, many of which could be done quickly and with ease, including
1) not requiring curb-and-gutter for parking lots (which also could benefit stormwater pollution control)
2) allowing two-layer pavement for roads instead of requiring three layers
3) not requiring signage no one will ever see along buffer areas
4) not requiring fully-screened Dumpsters at construction sites, as well as not requiring architectural matching of screens to the site
5) giving builders discretion concerning location of subdivision driveway entrances
All agreed these actions will help reduce development costs. But the one solution planners heard attendees say was the most important was eliminating the cash proffer.
The county’s proposed new Capital Improvement Program (CIP) calls for less than $3.2 million in spending from its total cash proffer account through FY 2013-14. As of the end of 2009, Chesterfield had more than $10.3 million in its total cash proffer account. Eliminating collection of the cash proffer for a four-year period, until July 1, 2014, would cut almost $19,000 from the cost of all new housing in Chesterfield County immediately. The CIP should be approved at the Board of Supervisors’ April 14 meeting. The CIP figures suggest the county can afford a four-year cash proffer moratorium.
County planners have no control over the cash proffer and did not want to discuss it during this meeting. But dropping the cash proffer means lower development and construction costs, which would encourage banks to make more building loans and put people back to work. It would allow affordable housing in a county where it is now practically impossible to provide. The lower prices that result from the moratorium will generate more new home sales, which will generate more property tax revenue the county desperately needs. It would signal that Chesterfield County is open for business and tell the business community that Chesterfield wants their employees to be able to live in the county where they work.
If the county is serious about reducing its cost of development, it will consider a four-year moratorium on its cash proffer, effective immediately.
The county plans to post on its website a list of all the ideas that have been proposed and responses to each idea. HBAR will let you know when the list has been posted.
