County lowers affordable housing fees

No comparison to Crested Butte

Gunnison County has updated its workforce housing linkage fees to reflect more current economic realities in the Gunnison Valley. The result is a decrease in linkage fees for both residential and commercial properties.

Under the old calculations, builders of residential properties between 500 and 999 square feet would have paid $710.50. Under the new fees, houses between 500 and 1,000 square feet will be charged between $338 and $646.
Updated studies and research showed that the workers per household and the job generation rate (both used to calculate linkage fees) decreased since fees were last calculated in 2006. But when housing authority executive director KT Gazunis recalculated the fees, the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners also asked her to smooth them out over 100-square-foot increments.
The old fees were calculated in increments of 1,000 to 1,500 square feet, resulting in significant jumps in fees from one increment to the next. A 3,900-square-foot home would have been charged a fee of $3,835, and a 4,000-square-foot home would have been charged $9,232.
“We all heard the legitimate protest that ‘If my house is 900 square feet, I pay this price, and then the square footage goes up 100 feet, and now I’m paying nearly double?” said Gazunis.
Under the new fees, that same 3,900-square-foot home will be charged $3,906 and a 4,000-square-foot home will be charged $4,084.
 The linkage fees for commercial properties were also adjusted to reflect a decrease in the workers per household and the number of workers generated per 1,000 square feet. That lowered the fee from $1,990 per 1,000 square feet to $1,785, or roughly $1.79 per square foot.
“I like the fact that it’s going down, and certainly on the commercial side I’d like to see it as low as we can get it. I know the argument is that they create jobs, but that’s what we want—that they create jobs,” said Commissioner Phil Chamberland.
The commissioners approved the new, lower fees just as Crested Butte is considering a significant increase in its affordable housing fees. But Gazunis cautions that comparing the county to a municipality is like comparing apples and oranges.
The county intentionally keeps the mitigation rate for affordable housing at 1 percent because the Gallagher Amendment dictates that businesses pay higher property taxes than residential properties. The state assesses residential properties at 7.96 percent, and commercial properties at 29 percent.
At the county level, then, businesses are paying a disproportionate amount of property taxes. Towns collect sales tax instead of property taxes, and that same discrepancy does not exist.
“So years ago, the commissioners decided to keep the mitigation rate [for linkage fees] as low as they could possibly go,” Gazunis said. “ The important thing is, don’t compare the county to Crested Butte because it’s apples and oranges.”
The county’s new fees are retroactive to March 1 of this year, when the new data used to calculate them became available. Gazunis did not want the time it took for the county to analyze that data to penalize residents.
“The most recent data became available in March, so I feel people who paid off of the older chart were not being served in our community with our latest and best effort,” she said.