City continues its waiver of developer fees
CALIFORNIA CITY — The temporary waiver of development impact fees for the City is being extended an additional five years.
The City Council unanimously voted to approve the extension during its regular meeting on Tuesday.
Councilmember Kelly Kulik off brought the proposal before the Council for exponential growth potential that would be positively impactful and help further development opportunities in the City.
The original resolution called for the waiver over a period of three years that would end on May 27, 2022. With the Council’s approval, the waiver period is extended to April 2026 after a new resolution is adopted at the next council meeting.
In 2016, the City approved a Master Fee Schedule that imposes development fees for water, in the amount of $1649 and sewer for $1898.
Public Works Director Joe Barragan said these fees were meant to help maintain the water system and fund repairs.
“When we did have the fees, we didn’t have a lot of building permits pulled,” he said. “If you look at the money that was generated from 2010 to let’s say 2017-18 for new residential homes, the amount of money you got for impact fees and connection fees were minuscule because nobody was pulling building permits.”
Barragan said the City is now looking at over 100 building permits for new residential for the current fiscal year.
“Now we are starting to see develop-
ment but we are not getting the impact fees or connection fees,” he said. “But we do have money in the standby fee account in the enterprise fund and there is money there to make repairs and do things for our city.”
Kulikoff also proposed to the rest of the Council to eliminate a fee of $10,774 for the Antelope Valley Eastern Kern Water District.
He said he was able to confirm with the San Joaquin Water Board and the State Water Resource Control Board that the City is in its right to eliminate AVEK and solely use its groundwater.
Despite the agreed notion by members of the Council, Barragan and City Manager Anna Linn to eliminate AVEK, they felt it was a little premature and wanted to wait for civil engineering company Quad Knopf, Inc. of Bakersfield to complete its current water rate study before moving forward with this decision.
“We need this water rate study,” Councilmember Karen Macedonio said. “If we can reach out to Quad Knopf and see if we can get a timeline on when this would come back to us and give us more time to make a wise, data-driven decision.”