Valley schools bursting
Spokane Valley’s housing boom is putting the pinch on area schools, which are now asking for a per-house fee to offset the consequences.
To get the money, Central Valley School District will need city and county governments to become willing bill collectors. State law prohibits school districts from collecting impact fees directly.
“We have no say” in collecting those fees, said Mike Pearson, Central Valley superintendent. “It’s entirely up to the jurisdictions where the new homes are being built, and we are hoping they will step forward.”
In letters dated April 26, Pearson asked Spokane County and the cities of Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake to impose impact fees on developers on behalf of the 80-square-mile school district. Impact fees are charged to developers before homes are built to help offset the effects of growth. The fees are usually passed on to buyers when the house is sold.
School populations are burgeoning in Liberty Lake and Greenacres, where more than 1,000 homes have been built in the past decade, and an additional 2,000 homes are planned.
Even without the new houses, Liberty Lake Elementary will have nearly 800 students next year, 200 over capacity. Greenacres Elementary School’s seams also are bulging.
The school board decided in April to place portable classrooms at those schools to handle the overflow until a new school can be built in that area. A new school would cost about $12 million and would be funded by a voter-approved bond, state funding and possibly impact fees.
University High School is also getting a portable, less than two years after the school’s construction.
In addition to impact fees, the board plans to discuss a bond proposal – for an amount that’s still being debated – for new schools at its meeting Monday night.
Impact fees would cover only a small percentage of construction costs for a new school, not the full bill, said school officials and developers who support the fees.
“This is not a mechanism to fund a school. This is a mechanism to participate in funding the school,” said Jason Wheaton. Wheaton is a partner with Greenstone Homes in Liberty Lake, the developer planning a 500-home subdivision called Rocky Hill, located north of Interstate 90 along Mission Avenue. Greenstone has had informal conversations with the city of Liberty Lake about impact fees, and has offered land to Central Valley for a new school within the Rocky Hill development, but no formal agreement has been met.
While Wheaton’s company supports the fees, he said “it’s the school district’s responsibility to put these mechanisms together. We can’t put the entire burden on the development community.”
Under the state Growth Management Act, passed in the mid-1990s, local governments can collect fees from developers to help offset the costs of new roads, sewers and parks, and in some cases schools.
To collect the fees, school districts must submit a capital facilities plan to the local government, which then decides how much the fees will be.
Though no one expects to see such large fees here, impact fees in the Olympia and Seattle areas can account for $17,000 to $25,000 of the price of a house.
“If you’re a developer, the fee seems huge,” said Rod Leland, the facilities director for the Federal Way (Wash.) School District in King County. His district has experienced a 3 percent increase in growth each year for the past 15 years and has collected impact fees for about 13 years. “But in reality, over time we might collect $1 million, and an elementary school can easily cost between $12 (million) and $15 million.”
In the Spokane area, the fees would be smaller, though the amount is not yet known and could vary by jurisdiction, said Dave Jackman, Central Valley administrator.
“You don’t get a great deal, but (the fees) are a small help,” Jackman said. “More importantly, it sends a signal to the community that the school district is doing everything we can to meet the needs, before asking for a bond approval.”
Though none of the three local governments running through Central Valley’s boundaries currently collects impact fees, the county has collected them for school districts, including Central Valley, in the past.
Homebuilders have not been easily sold on impact fees. Many argue that the property taxes eventually generated by new homes are contribution enough.
Property taxes are fine, school officials say, but the new students often arrive before the tax revenue.
Before the Growth Management Act, under now-outdated rules, some school districts would request a mitigation fee for every new home, which the county would collect, said Al Swanson, assistant superintendent of finance for the Mead School District north of Spokane.
“I think we were getting around $100 per lot, something like that,” Swanson said. “Then we were informed of a court decision … that really questioned the legitimacy of a school district to do that,” so the fees were snuffed out.
Mead, like Central Valley, has experienced intense growing pains, specifically on the Five Mile Prairie and the Hatch Road area near Highway 395, Swanson said.
“There are reasons that are advocated both by developers and school districts for impact fees,” Swanson said.
“Growth causes new houses, which causes more students, and they ought to be responsible for paying for additional schools.”