The Ledger published the first in a series of articles on the challenge of becoming a community of 1 million people in a few years.
Interestingly, it was accompanied by an article on the expected revenue loss to government coffers from a referendum that will allow more homestead exemption property tax breaks to owners of more expensive homes. Many of us of more modest means will not see a change in our tax bills.
The pairing of the articles is apt because managing growth is largely about the financial decisions local government officials make.
Property taxes make up about a quarter to a third of the revenue needed to balance many local government budgets.
Even without the increased homestead tax break, residential growth has never paid enough in taxes to cover the cost of the services new residents demand.
That’s where impact fees come in.
Impact fees can be used to improve roads, build roads and parks and other public facilities, finance the expansion and upgrading of utility systems and, in the rare cases where they are imposed this way, pay to expand courthouses and other public buildings when the demands of growth overtake their capacity.
Polk’s historic approach –in contrast with more progressive counties—was to pursue development on the cheap.
Impact fees were minimal, if they were collected at all.
That resulted in an infrastructure deficit, which the business community engineered via Polk Vision to make an issue and to make the general public pay for through a major property tax increase.
It’s not hard to imagine this happening again after a five-year moratorium on impact fees and a low-ball set of figures commissioners decided to charge when it was revived.
The growth advocates on the County Commission tried to solve that problem by floating a sales tax increase, which the voters soundly rejected because they didn’t want to get taxed again to bail out developers .
Their next gambit was to increase property taxes by sleight-of-hand, diverting money approved for environmental lands acquisition to some of the same purposes—road improvements—that the failed sales tax proposal had advocated.
Meanwhile, Polk officials’ claimed concern about the revenue hit from the homestead exemption increase belies their decision to approve millions of dollars in property tax breaks to struggling corporations such as Amazon and Wal-Mart as part of the economic development extortion game.
Finally, Polk County’s approach to dealing with crowded roads has sometimes been to propose building new roads farther away from urban centers. All these roads will do is to subsidize more urban sprawl and to ultimately increase the backlog of projects needed to keep up with new residents’ demands.
The problem with this approach, apart from the expense, is that it delays the day when Polk will seriously talk about transit.
As long as it is easy to drive and the transit system is limited, no one except the poorest residents will take transit regularly.
Before Polk’s population reaches 1 million, it may be time to rethink our expectations. Is it really realistic, even today, to expect a smooth commute on major highways?
Maybe the big change should be to deal with reality, not fantasy.