AG 1999 06 21 - Laserfiche WebLink

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bedrooms translate into dwelling units that are larger and cost more, fees would be greater for those who could afford more expensive housing. As ultimately enacted by the board of commissioners, the impact fee ordinance does not recognize variations in housing type or the number of bedrooms. However, projections based on these variations were made by the county staff and are likely to be reviewed further. An important methodological step was to select appropriate "service standards" that could be used to define the nature of the school building and capital equipment that should be provided to serve new growth. In order to estimate school construction costs, such service standards were expressed in terms of student capacity for a prototype school, building square footage, and land area per student. The county discovered that most of the schools in both the Orange County and the Chapel HilI-Carrboro districts provided facilities that exceeded the minimum service standards for public schools set by the Office of School Planning of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction; Indeed, the respective school boards had recommended standards for new schools that exceeded even the "local averages" of existing schools in the two districts. However, because no formal service standards had been adopted by the districts, and Using the state standards would result in lower, more conservative estimates of the costs that could be assigned to new residents, the state's standards were used in the calculation to make fees more legally defensible.44 The costs of acquiring sites for and constructing elementary, middle, and hfgh schools were then estimated. The same cost figures were used for facilities in both districts. The estimates revealed a total capital cost per student 48 44. /d. at 4-5. 43