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What is your position on impact fees for new development?

We will soon see the downside of unchecked urban sprawl and/or hodgepodge development and small towns like Sumrall will be forced to continuously play a costly game of catch-up with infrastructure needs. Those who create impacts on a municipality or community need to help pay for those impacts. 

Interested in where you stand on planned development in general as well. 

Thank you for your question! This is something that would seem to be reasonable to consider. Actually, impact fees have been highly debated for quite some time between governments and developers. While solid arguments can be made that “for-profit” builders, businesses, etc. that can be identified as having substantial impact on infrastructure should help defray the costs of those “impacts”, the MS Supreme Court found these fees to be illegal.  

The court concluded: “Courts cannot fault the logic or the foresight that induces the municipality to consider the long-term impact of permitted development on municipal resources and public facilities. However, in the absence of legislative intent, municipalities cannot depart from traditionally authorized methods of financing public facilities so as to allocate the costs of substantial public projects among new developments on the basis of their anticipated impact.” Check out the case at: https://cases.justia.com/mississippi/supreme-court/CO33352.pdf?ts=1462383390

The National Association of Home Builders Handbook (https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/advocacy/docs/state-and-local/impact-fee-handbook.pdf) indicates, on page 120 (Appendix B), that Mississippi municipalities continue to lack the authority to collect impact fees. This being the case, until changed through legislation or a constitutional amendment, our town can only assess a few minor fees (as stipulated by the courts) such as those related to utility connections and site/building inspections.  I agree that there are instances where those responsible for substantial impacts should help bear the burden, however at this time there does not appear to be a legal avenue involving impact fees. 

As to your second question regarding planned development, I am very interested in the development of a long-term, comprehensive growth plan for our town.  It must include strategies to maintain and improve services to all citizens, it must involve all stakeholders (citizens, businesses, schools, etc.) and it must address our inevitable growth.  Our town has a great small-town feel, we are close enough to many conveniences of larger cities, yet far enough away to enjoy a more peaceful lifestyle and slower pace. Our schools are excellent, our youth are known for their academic, artistic and athletic success. We have a historic downtown area that is regularly improving and creating a more vibrant town center. There are numerous available commercial properties in areas ripe for growth.  We should focus on opportunities to entice businesses that will complement our current business atmosphere and support what makes our town special.  I am not in favor of growing simply to be able to say we’ve grown, what I am in favor of is growth that supports and maintains the positive aspects of our community that have made our town so desirable. 

My vision for our town is that we focus on positive growth, by enforcing appropriate regulations while constantly planning, maintaining and improving our infrastructure, so that we leave this town for the future generations in better shape than it is today.

I’ve heard the water system here is in terrible shape with all the new builds and communities. As we wake up on Saturday morning with NO water, can you tell me your plans? 

Thank you for reaching out! Your question related to today’s outage and the impact of new builds and communities is a timely one. I’d like to provide a couple of different answers, because today’s cut-off and the impacts of new builds and communities-though related-have different causes and solutions.

As for today’s cutoffs, they are related to system repairs. Some would like to view these repairs as downfalls of the system, but in most cases these repairs are regular, necessary actions required to maintain service. It sounds ludicrous to say that service must be cut-off in order to maintain that same service, but unfortunately due to the manner in which the first couple of generations of town water lines were installed, in many cases this is currently our only option. One might think of an oil change in their vehicle. When most folks need an oil change, they are able to leave the roadway, go into a service center, have service completed and be back on the road in less than an hour. The maintenance process for automobiles was designed so that a vehicle could be maintained without stopping the flow of traffic. Unfortunately, when the town needs to service many portions of the water system, this isn’t the case. Due to standard practices and installation techniques that were apparently commonplace many years ago during the installation of early generations of town water lines, there is not an ability to isolate problems to small areas, thus requiring large scale water shut-offs. Think of it as needing an oil change and being unable to leave the roadway-while your car is being serviced, ALL traffic is required to stop. This is a major issue for most customers on Town water. 

To be fair, when these shut-offs occur, the water department does often try to install shut-off valves as they are doing repairs so that if there is a future repair, there will be an ability to isolate. Unfortunately, most of the early town waterlines are those closest to the water wells and tanks. This causes significant impacts to areas farther away that may have isolation capabilities nearer the end of the line, but must still be cut-off in order to service between the cut-off and the well/tank. The overall situation can be improved (and is being improved to some extent) but the improvements are costly and as noted by many folks, very inconvenient. I’d like to see these system improvements continue and maybe even increase in frequency, but it will not be without inconveniences.

As to your question about the new builds and communities coming to town, there are both positives and negatives that come with this growth. On the positive side, if a new development is properly engineered and the town holds the development to the high standards that it should, the infrastructure (water lines, sewer lines, drainage and roadways) within the development should be without issue once completed. Assuming that this is the case, the issue then becomes the town’s ability to provide the services as expected. Our town has been able to support a great deal of development over the past twenty to twenty-five years. I’ve personally witnessed the addition of no less than two hundred single family residences in this time. Though we seem able to fairly well service most of what we have today, we must recognize the issues on the south end of town about insufficient pressure (though they have good volume) and issues with sewage backing up into various places that it shouldn’t.  The basic sewage infrastructure that is utilized currently was installed in the 1980s and continues to serve the town, even with the explosive growth of the last two decades.

We need to make sure that serious, long-range planning and improvements to these systems as a whole are an important component of any town administration. By tracking prior growth and projecting future growth, we can develop a plan that will help us function into the future, maintaining services at a high level of efficiency and keeping our town desirable place to live and/or raise a family. To be fair, there has been a large volume water line run to the south end of town and there is some mention of a new well and tank to help service town customers.  I feel that these should absolutely be part of a long-term plan, guided by qualified civil engineers, based on solid growth data/projections and prepared in such a way that we would be eligible for the maximum amount of grant aid and funds available through various sources.  Though we must recognize some problems exist, we must also recognize that we are in far better shape than other systems in our state (Capitol City) and we must work today to see that we don’t have significant problems in our future.