HomeMy WebLinkAbout7/2/2024 Item 7a, Schmidt, R.
Richard Schmidt <
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Subject:agenda comment 6a: fee increases
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Dear Council, June 27, 2024
Re Item 6a: Fees. The fee increases before you are presented as normal, to be expected, and as
American as apple pie, but when many of them bring fees to in excess of 300% of the already-cost-
adjusted present fees, those propagandistic contentions may be disregarded. There are also a lot of new
fees, where previously fee-free matters will now be charged substantial fees. The city is driving inflation
with these fees. Taken as a whole, these increases have really bad optics, and that should concern this
council.
Here are comments on several aspects of the fee schedule before you.
1. Appeal fees. The proposed increase in appeal fees to over $3,500 is terribly wrong. You should not
only reject the increase, but roll back the already-too-high existing $745 fee to something fair and
reasonable, say $50. Why? Appeals are a fundamental right under the American “rights” system (see
below for more comment on that matter), and furthermore provide an essential check and balance on the
city bureaucracy’s actions. They are, in short, a good government measure as well as a fairness issue.
Pricing them so most citizens are priced out is just plain wrong. Pricing them so you never see appeals
denies you your right and duty to correct bureaucratic misjudgments and errors. Pricing them to
discourage appeals promotes public cynicism about the city’s good faith and the validity and honesty of its
actions. Pricing them this way is bad government.
I served on the planning commission for 8 years, and from time to time we received appeals of
administrative actions. Sometimes the appeals seemed less warranted, other times they seemed more
warranted. But that wasn’t the point. Frankly, hearing appeals was one of the more interesting and
productive things we did. We not only gave the appellants a second chance to seek what they thought
fair, but also were able to use these collegial discussions to communicate our sentiments about planning
practices to staff. The appeals were good for all parties.
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2. Fee increases that are counterproductive to promoting council goals. In glancing through the
planning and building fee changes, it struck me that it’s nuts to be substantially increasing fees for things
the council wants residents to do, especially in the carbon mitigation field. I noted, for example, these
fees:
• PV system, residential, from $196 to $622, the new fee being 317% of the old.
• PV “unit installation,” (What is a unit? And how is this applied?) from $84 to $267, another 318% change.
• Electric car charging system, from $149 to $489, the new fee being 328% of the old.
• Electric service upgrade required for household electrification, from $149 to $334.
• Window retrofits (non-structural, which means switching out existing windows for new ones), a “base”
fee up from $241 to $401; with individual units subject to a new fee, from the present $0 to $265.
• Graywater systems, from $184 to $622, the new fee being 338% of the old.
These are all things that fall under the council’s carbon-free target initiative. Why such high fees? Does it
not appear unseemly to require many of these permits of homeowners doing remodels one month, then
the next month to jack up the fees this way? I don’t get what message the city is trying to send.
I seriously question, based on personal experience, why there is anything other than a nominal fee for any
of these permits. For example, when I got my PV system in 2003, it required only an electrical permit,
which involved my turning in paperwork, paying a fee, and being handed a permit over the counter.
“Inspection,” which took place after PG&E had done theirs, consisted of an inspector knocking on my
door, the two of us walking to the inverter and service box, his glancing at the inverter then opening the
box, closing it and marking his inspection card as done – a grand total of perhaps 3 minutes. No look at
what was on the roof. It’s hard to understand a charge of $622 for this.
3. Fee increases that nickel and dime homeowners. In looking again at planning and building fees, it
seems some are way overpriced in ways that are just plain mean to ordinary homeowners, and thus
create inducement to do things without a permit. If you want common people to comply with the permit
system, should you not charge fair and reasonable fees to encourage compliance?
• Tree removal permit, from $182 to $661, the new fee being 363% of the old. If you wish people to get
permits and not just remove trees without permits on weekends and holidays (there’s a thriving business
in doing it that way), this seems an odd way to do so. Especially when the administrative fine for removing
a tree without a permit is likely to be $500, which is less than a permit.
• Chimney repair, presumably for safety reasons, $1,023, which adds substantially to the cost of repair
and the level of plan check/inspection would probably be minimal. By contrast, a new foundation permit
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for an entire house, which presumably would require engineering check and several inspections, is only
slightly more, at $1,558.
• Fence height exception appeal, from $387 to $1,325, the new fee being 340% of the old. That’s more
than the fence is likely to cost! In addition, a tall fence is likely also to require a building permit, and it’s
unclear how much that adds on to planning permits, but it would be substantial under the new schedule.
• Home occupation permit, from $166 to $695, the new fee being 418% of the old. There’s also a
“business fee” for home occupations, $301.
How does a fee schedule so unfair to the mass of your constituents even make it to the council agenda? There
are two reasons.
A. Who was included in the process? Staff used a “stakeholder” process to decide who would be at the table, and there
were three non-city entities considered to be worthy: the Chamber of Commerce, REACH, and the builders’ association.
Who was not at the table? We the people. As they say, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. Unfortunately, this
cribbed form of stakeholder politics is typical of how staff goes about getting “public input.”
B. The fee increase process produces a classic example of what’s called “death by process.” Bureaucracies public and
corporate love to establish, at great expenditure of time, words and money, processes for doing things. Then the process
is allowed to run its course, and since it is by then an established process, it may not be questioned as it runs its course.
This mechanistic route leads to “conclusions” that are wholly predictable from the structure of the process, and totally void
of any ethical content – in this case of any good government or fair government content. The process steamrolls ahead,
and all in the way get crushed by it. And thus we end up with the “death” of important civic and community values, like for
example fairness, because who can dare challenge the outcome’s legitimacy if the adopted process was followed? In this
case the pre-determined outcome was clear from the start – staff was going to find a way to justify and ask for increased
permit and appeal fees, whether such were actually justified, sensible, reasonable, consistent with other policies, or fair,
because that’s what the process was designed to do.
A wise council would cancel the process used to reach the fee schedule before them tonight.
Below is more about the appeal fee fiasco before you, from a blog post.
Richard Schmidt
News Flash. SLO City wants Jane Q Citizen to have to pay $3,500 in fees to appeal a faulty use permit the city issued for
a fraternity next door to her home. That’s up from an already too high fee of $745, and appears to be a naked political
maneuver to shut down appeals altogether.
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That increase is what city staff are telling the city council to do Tuesday July 2. Is that fair? Is it decent? Should we allow
our city council to do that to us?
The right to appeal to government is a fundamental human right under our American constitutional system. That’s
because, as all who are properly educated should know, the right of appeal is explicitly spelled out in the First Amendment
to the Constitution, which guarantees “the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
That right, a basic human right for all of us, is stated without qualification. The First Amendment doesn’t say the right of
appeal is open only to the rich, only to those who can afford whatever “fee” a city may want to charge, and is closed to the
rest of us. The guaranteed appeal right is open to all, on an equal basis.
It was only by adding a “bill of individual citizens’ rights” to the draft constitution, which as originally conceived was a
document describing the bureaucratic structure and purpose of a federal government, that ratification of the Constitution
by the 13 states was secured. And the First Amendment was first because it encompassed hot human rights issues of
that era: freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly and appeal to government, all of which had been abused – in
colonists’ eyes -- by the British crown.
One may recall also that glib mishandling of citizen “petitions” by the King of England had been explicitly cited in the
Declaration of Independence as justification for revolution: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which
may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
In the years since Constitutional ratification, the importance of the right of appeal has only grown, and courts have made
clear that both speech and petition are integral to maintaining the democratic process.
The city of SLO, having already truncated speech rights by cutting off video comments, now wants to truncate appeal
rights by charging fees it knows will all but eliminate the ability of common people to appeal staff decisions.
This is a city choice, not a necessary thing. Staff’s report asking the council to jack up appeal fees puts it this way: “Many
City services are considered a general public good and are funded through general tax revenues, however, some services
are funded only by the users of the service.”
The city has arbitrarily decided that the “general public good” doctrine applies to streets and bike lanes, things paid for by
the city, but doesn’t apply to protecting the human rights of speech and appeal. In other words, making an appeal, in the
city’s thinking, is like parking your car in a municipal garage and paying a parking fee – you use a city service and you pay
for it. That’s a fundamental thought error based on ignoring centuries of appeals history and the important role the right of
appeal plays in keeping government honest, responsive and democratic. Appeals aren’t a city service, they’re a right.
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Further, the city admits (in the staff report for July 2’s meeting) it is using high appeal fees to truncate the right of appeal in
order to achieve certain political ends, namely “to not overly encourage” appeals, to avoid costs, and “to not discourage
housing or other important City Goals.” That shows deliberate intent to use appeal fees as a political tool and to ignore the
human rights such policy short-changes.
As for why the huge proposed fourfold+ increase in appeal fees, the staff report justifies this as “due to the controversial
nature and complexity of appeals,” which suggests further political motive. After all, appeals would be “controversial” to
staff whose decisions are being questioned by an appeallant. Having shed the arrogance of King George, is city staff now
to assume an equivalent role of inflicting “repeated injury” with impunity?
It strikes me there’s a fundamental problem not only with the city’s fee proposal, but also with its thinking about
the role and purpose of appeals. Fees that are so high as to be exclusionary for most of us are ethically
offensive. But isn’t charging anything at all for appeals equally wrong? Human rights are things that accrue to
us, not things we should have to pay cash to enjoy.
The role of the right of appeal in promoting good and open government, it seems to me, makes the “service
rendered” equation the opposite of what the city thinks. It is the appellant who renders the service, for free, to the
cause of good government for the city. That freely-offered service more than justifies the city’s encouraging
appeals, and making them free to the appellant.
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