Unhappy (San Diego County) supervisors adopt traffic fee

[question everything]

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Unhappy supervisors adopt traffic fee

By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO ---- Saying they "had no choice," but acknowledging their action could hurt commercial development and hike housing prices, supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday to approve the county's first traffic-impact fee.

Supervisors said the county desperately needed the controversial new fee to unclog a "de facto moratorium" on backcountry home building caused by changes to California laws requiring all developments to have extremely expensive, extremely broad, traffic studies.

County planners said the new fee will give residential builders a cheaper alternative to the traffic studies, which can cost $20,000 to $30,000, and unclog a jam of roughly 270 projects that have been on hold for as long as 18 months.

But even the four supervisors who voted for the fee ---- which will require future residential, retail, office and industrial development to pony up $909 million over the next 40 years to build new roads ---- held their collective nose.

More..

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/04/14/news/top_stories/20_42_484_13_05.txt

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at [phone] or [e-mail].

[leesa]

1. Aw gee..we couldn't possibly help our uncontrolled growth and bad planning

so, shucks, I guess you suckers have to pay for it now.. I live in a city next to San Diego and they have ZERO growth controls...no responsibility at all.

[Richard Steele]

2. This is how they "getcha"

Everyone involved is so WRONG, I don't know who to HATE first.

And so this ends up in the "bullshit as usual" file, and life goes on spinning down the toilet.

The person who advised us to "CHOOSE our Battles" wrongly assumed that we would always be able to UNDERSTAND our choices.