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• Introduction <br /> Orange County, North Carolina, established an impact fee to help fund public school <br /> construction in the summer of 1993. The fee was calculated using data from the 1990 Census, <br /> and the calculations are described in detail in the Technical Report. Calculation of <br /> Proportionate Share Impact Fees for Financing Public School Capital Needs. As originally <br /> established, the fee was $750 for each unit constructed in the County. Early in the summer of <br /> 1995, the County Commissioners raised the impact fee to $1500 for housing units constructed <br /> in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District while keeping it the same for the Orange County <br /> School District. This study was commissioned in the summer of 1995 in order to address <br /> questions that arose both from the creation of the Technical Report itself and from public <br /> hearings. <br /> The main goal of this study was to determine the statistical relationship, if any, <br /> between the number of public school children in new housing units and the type, number of <br /> bedrooms, size, and value of that housing. For instance, do families with more children have <br /> • larger houses, houses with more bedrooms, or houses with a higher assessed value than <br /> families with fewer children? This kind of a relationship could be used to justify a schedule of <br /> public school impact fees that varies based on housing characteristics, rather than the current <br /> flat fee where each housing unit pays the same amount regardless of size or value. <br /> In order to perform this analysis, data was collected on all new housing units which <br /> received a Certificate of Occupancy between January 1, 1992 and December 31, 19941. <br /> Spring 1995 enrollment information for public school students was also collected', and this <br /> was matched to the housing unit data. The result was a data set containing a list of all new <br /> housing units in Orange County, their characteristics, and the number of public school children <br /> in each housing unit. Two separate data sets, one for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District <br /> and one for the Orange County School District, were created in this way. <br /> These data sets were then analyzed to test for the statistical relationships between each <br /> of the housing characteristics and the number of public school children in each unit. The tests <br /> performed tell whether or not there are statistically significant relationships between the <br /> • <br /> 'For the remainder of this report,the phrase"new housing"refers to this set of housing units. <br /> =For the remainder of this report,the terms"children"and"students"refer to children enrolled in the public school system only. <br />