WakeUp! Wake County is at it again. This so-called grassroots group, that claims the moral high-road on everything from schools to roads to open space, continues to call for more taxes on homes, more taxes on land, more taxes on you.
If they can’t get a new home tax, they go for what’s called an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO). That’s fancy planning words for “stop the growth, we’re on board so pull up the ladder!”
We see two problems with APFOs. First ,the jury (literally) is out on whether local governments can adopt APFOs without getting permission from the legislature. Union County, NC is currently in a lawsuit with local landowners over that very issue. All of the other counties with APFOs may be in legal jeopardy depending on the outcome of the lawsuit.
Second, APFOs cause more sprawl, more traffic congestion, loss of jobs and economic opportunities. And if you don’t believe us, then just head north to Maryland (the mack-daddy APFO state) and see for yourself. It’s a mess. Read all about it here. And here.
APFOs are the result, in our view, of local governments’ failure to plan. And they are really designed, at the end of the day, to stop growth. Of course, that’s the aim of certain special interest groups—including WakeUp Wake County. We don’t need to take our lead from such groups. Their ideas, implemented in other parts of NC and across the country, have failed to solve growth problems or instigated law suits.
We all need to “wake up” from this nightmare scenario before it’s too late.
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APF Ordinances were established in Florida in the late 1980’s. APF ordinances as a concept was a good planning tool. It required governments fo do a 10 year plan on needs and then develop a 5 year plan showing how they were going to pay for the needed improvements. A developer could advance a project, if they paid for it up front and then they were reimbursed when it would have normally come up in the plan.
The problem with APF ordinances is the added term “concurrency”. Concurrency means that development could not occur if the level of service was below a local governments proposed minimul level or your servuce or if a development would lower the level of service to below the acceptable level. Sounds good on paper, but in reality it did not work.
The state initiated a review of their growth management initatives 15 years after they first instituted their growth management plan. The report found that APF ordinances did not do what they thought they would do. They found that municipalities kept lowering the level of service, because there is a part of an APF ordinance that says you cannot deny development unless you have a plan in place and the funding needed to correct the deficiencies. It was hoped that developers would make the improvements needed in order to develop, but that did not happen. The developer just passed on that piece of property and moved further out to develop and the local government still had to improve the level of service, because they denied the development. There was one statement in the report that said that APF ordinance only increased property taxes and increased urban sprawl.
What people do not realize is that if you deny development because of inadequate public facilities, they still have to make the needed improvements, but without the added tax base to help pay for it. That means higher property taxes.
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