East Grand School District board approves fee-in-lieu study, updating 40-year-old ordinance

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The East Grand School District board approved and accepted a fee-in-lieu of land dedication study at its Dec. 17 meeting, updating the school district’s previous fee-in-lieu ordinance and simplifying the process for municipalities, the school district and developers.
A one-time fee or land dedication is required to be fulfilled by developers building in municipalities where the East Grand School District operates. When new housing is built, the developer can choose to give land to the school district or pay a fee, known as fee-in-lieu of land dedication. The updated ordinance determines the fee by what dwelling type is being built and the municipality in which it is being built.
Because most developers in Grand County are small, many choose to pay the fee rather than dedicate land, according to Shannon Bingham, a demographer and consultant with Western Demographics who was hired by the district to review its process for school site fees.
Traditional “impact fees” on construction projects are not constitutional in Colorado; however, fee-in-lieu of land dedication has been widely used for decades across the state, Bingham said.
“It’s not a ‘sticks and bricks’ fee,” he said. “It is a fee statewide that has been applied by most school districts to help them purchase sites, deal with site infrastructure and other short-term capital needs. I would say the majority of the districts on the Front Range and most of the mountain districts that have a lot of resort development have these fees.”
The school district’s previous rule had been in place since the late 1970s or early 1980s, and Bingham said the “legacy” ordinance needed to be updated to reflect current development patterns, avoid “ad-hoc” calculations for the cost of individual developments and better measure school impacts.
The updated ordinance creates a fee table for developments that takes into account factors like current developed land values, comparable sale numbers and how many students a jurisdiction contributes to the system on average, known as the student yield factor.
The student yield factor reflects the number of children a school district can expect to attend from a particular town or development. Because Granby and Fraser typically produce more children than Grand Lake and Winter Park, for example, developments in those two towns will pay a higher fee on average.
One board member expressed concern about Winter Park’s lower fee amount because the town has potential for growth and development in the future. He suggested Winter Park have a higher fee, but Bingham explained that the fees can be reviewed and updated as often as every two to four years. Bingham also said that this is a common practice for rapidly developing school districts. The board expressed interest in updating these numbers in the future.
Another board member questioned why the proposed rate for mobile homes was different from other development types, when they often have a larger impact on the school district in terms of number of students. Bingham explained that mobile homes are typically one of the last dependable types of affordable housing, so he recommends keeping fees lower to allow them to remain affordable despite typically producing more children than other dwelling types.
The fee-in-lieu of land dedication study was unanimously accepted by the board members. By following Bingham’s recommendation to update the fee structure, East Grand School District is now in line with other Colorado school districts.
Board members appointed Superintendent Brad Ray to work with town governments and the district’s legal counsel to implement the updates.

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