The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Nearly $120,000 outstanding
Gunnison County should have nearly $400,000 in affordable housing “linkage fees” in its coffers. In theory, the money is paid by local contractors for every building project in the county of a certain size. But county officials are finding it hard to collect all the money due them from people building homes.
With nearly a quarter of the entire $380,000 linkage fee fund outstanding, the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners is trying to find ways of getting the county its money without adding to the financial distress of Gunnison Valley builders.
The system of paying into the fund is flexible right now. County planning director Joanne Williams is seeing more and more people paying the fee for affordable housing after the permitting and building process has finished.
That is leaving the county to act as a debt collector in some situations, even offering interest free payment plans to people struggling to retire the debt, which has county manager Matthew Birnie, housing director KT Gazunis and Williams a little uneasy.
“Once we run into a problem [getting the linkage fee], it is a problem. Sometimes it comes down to a lien on a house or in other cases we’ve created a payment plan, which isn’t a great setup for the county,” Birnie said. “But we figured it was the best way to get paid and not create another foreclosure.”
The linkage fee, approved in 2006 to help offset the impacts the construction industry has on the affordable housing pool, is supposed to be collected at the time a Certificate of Occupancy (CO) is issued.
But the size and rural nature of the county means that not everyone is paying the fee, by avoiding a CO before they move in. Other people, some who can most easily afford the fee, are just not paying.
But more often, Birnie said it is the builders of modest means who get to the end of the job and find themselves out of financing, so the outstanding fee continues to go unpaid.
“We have a clear way to enforce it, but we haven’t done that because it seemed a little heavy-handed,” he said. The linkage fee is required of individual homebuilders making less than 120 percent of the average median income in Gunnison County, which is $63,480 for a two-person household.
Commissioner Jim Starr agreed that the county should avoid getting tough with the people who don’t pay, saying he “never wanted to impact the people who are building low to moderate income homes with this.”
But commissioner Hap Channell felt the philosophy of the program was in the right place, although he understood the concern for builders living on the financial edge who might struggle with the linkage fee.
“This is just the cost of doing business in Gunnison County. I tend to think of it as this is the way we do it. We all chip in to help the underserved element of the population,” Channell argued. “When buildings are built or added onto, there is an increased demand in workforce. I’m a little more of the mind that this should be more of an upfront cost of doing business.”
Commissioner Swenson agreed, but as she remembered, paying the fee was only a problem for a small portion of the people getting building permits.
“In 2007, there were 113 permits that paid it ahead of time and two that had issues,” Swenson said. “I think we can continue to have some flexibility in this but we do have to be tight. If you don’t pay it, there is a reprimand.”
Unable to take any action in the work session on Tuesday, July 27, the commissioners directed staff to come up with contract language that would require builders to pay the linkage fee on some sort of timeline. A second look at the topic won’t be rescheduled until staff has more time to consider its options.
