Do school-impact fees on West Hawaii property owners make sense?
For several decades, public policy has been that taxpayers shouldn’t bear the entire brunt of building new schools in growth areas, but this policy was implemented project-by-project because there was no state law obligating developers to pay. A group of developers, educators, and state and county officials spent two years developing an equitable and rational method for requiring some of the costs of future schools be paid by those who would use them. The 2007 Legislature carried out the recommendations of that working group. Act 245 set out the process for the Department of Education to determine where fees should be collected and spent, and established formulas to calculate the amount of land and fees required. Impact fees apply to individual vacant lots as well as multilot developments. The law requires a contribution of land for a school and 10 percent of the cost of school construction, based on the number of units planned in a new project. State taxpayers would pay the other 90 p
