We are just a few days away from the City Council Meeting where the 2045 Comprehensive Plan is on the agenda. Care4Suffolk has pointed out many problems with this comprehensive plan, among the most important issues is the lack of a fiscal impact analysis.
A fiscal impact analysis allows a municipality to understand how specific development will impact a city financially over time. It looks at both the revenue that will be generated from the development and also the costs of services (roads, schools, utilities, emergency services, libraries, parks, etc.) and then compares them to determine if the development will bring a net positive fiscal contribution to the city, or if it will be a net negative and cost the city money.
Most municipalities also do a fiscal analysis during the comprehensive planning process. It allows a city to look at the type of growth they want to see and whether it will financially benefit the city or be a drain on the taxpayers. The City of Suffolk has decided to forgo the essential fiscal analysis. Why?
City Staff assured City Council that a fiscal analysis isn’t necessary for the comprehensive plan, despite the fact that it is about to increase the growth area by the largest amount of any previous comp plan. Staff’s reasoning was because the fiscal analyses are done at the site level. It is true that by law, they are required to be done for all rezoning applications.
Suffolk’s UDO (Unified Development Ordinance) reads:
B-14. – FISCAL IMPACT ANALYSIS.
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All applications for a rezoning shall include a Fiscal Impact Study containing a comparison of the public revenues anticipated to be generated by the development and the anticipated capital, operations, maintenance and replacement costs for public facilities needed to service the project at the adopted level of service standards (see Section 31-601 of this Ordinance).
Furthermore, the UDO states that no rezoning application is complete without a fiscal analysis.
However, in a previous article, we demonstrated that the fiscal analysis for the Port 460 project, which was two years ago and was arguably the LARGEST rezoning application in years, failed to provide an adequate fiscal analysis. The developer did provide fiscal data, but it only showed all the money the city might make on the development. It left out all the costs of services.
Based on the UDO, that rezoning proposal never should have made it through the Planning Department because it lacked a proper fiscal analysis. Yet, it not only made it through the Planning Department, the Planning Commission voted to recommend approval, and City Council voted to approve the rezoning.
Suffolk has been rezoning with no idea if all this development in the long-term will bring money into the city coffers or cost taxpayers money to maintain it. The whole point of a fiscal analysis is to protect the citizens from poor planning and development that drains our resources.
Currently, City Staff fail to provide oversight to make sure a complete and accurate fiscal analysis is done at a rezoning. They also refuse to do a fiscal analysis for the comprehensive plan. How can City Council be so irresponsible with our taxpayer money? If the developer and the city can’t prove that these developments are fiscally beneficial for the city, they should not be approved. The same is true with the comprehensive plan. If City Staff want to increase Sufflolk’s growth area by the largest amount of any comp plan, they should have to prove that it is fiscally sound.
Join us at the City Council Meeting on Wednesday, November 20th at 6pm (City Hall, 442 W. Washington St.) and let City Council know that you do not want the 2045 Comprehensive Plan approved until they have completed the fiscal analysis.