Orange County NC Website
Approved 12/7/2016 <br /> <br />5 <br />Paul Guthrie: The price of land in this county, especially in the bottom half or two thirds, is one of the biggest 212 <br />problems in getting any kind of modest housing. Because you can’t build without a huge land cost and then on top 213 <br />of that, because there’s largely not environmental systems in place of more density for smaller houses you get an 214 <br />extra cost for trying to build a smaller house because of the changing dynamic of this county. I don’t know if this 215 <br />says anything about that in great detail but you’ve heard my sermon about what I think is a dangerous thing to 216 <br />continue the limitation of the extension of public utility lines to unbuilt areas of the county. They’re not going to stop 217 <br />it and that’s a rolling cost over time. If you build these smaller places that are on a septic system or even a common 218 <br />septic system 10-15 years from now they’re going to have to have public water or sewage system and that’s going 219 <br />to immediately throw the market out of kilter again. Those are the kinds of things that worry me. 220 <br /> 221 <br />Craig Benedict: There have been discussions about what creates the higher cost of housing and higher cost of 222 <br />land. And the urban service boundary and restriction, when the demand’s high and the supply’s low that’s what 223 <br />creates it. Now in other parts of the United States where you’ve had these urban service boundaries they were 224 <br />interim urban service boundaries until you built, supposedly as efficiently as you could, inside there and then said, 225 <br />“Hey, we still have another 20,000 people coming, let’s pop the boundary out” after you had preserved whatever 226 <br />green belts. It won’t be me proposing that, to move the rural buffer line. 227 <br /> 228 <br />Lisa Stuckey: We tried. We tried for a school. You have to get all the jurisdictions to agree and it went nowhere. 229 <br /> 230 <br />Tony Blake: Yeah, it’s a little like trying to combine the school system. 231 <br /> 232 <br />Craig Benedict: So with that in mind the intensification of the remaining land is necessary. Probably less single-233 <br />family in the municipal areas; they’re going to have to go. We’re predicting 65% multi-family will probably be 234 <br />occurring on the remaining land. Now in the rural parts of the county there will be single-family and I think there are 235 <br />some opportunities. But we’re trying to still be as efficient as possible and if new housing is put on, well and septic, 236 <br />there needs to be some of those things in mind in case there are failures. This topic we could have a little ORC 237 <br />meeting on it, in the coming months because I think that’s going to be coming up. 238 <br /> 239 <br />Craig Benedict continued presentation. 240 <br /> 241 <br />Lydia Wegman: Do you think there’s any chance of consistency? 242 <br /> 243 <br />Craig Benedict: I think there is. We have an Efland implementation focus group, we might have to bring back that 244 <br />community group and say this is what our goal is. I think that will be a challenge but we might have some that could 245 <br />fit across. We might have some opportunities there. Fiscal impact analysis, maybe not as much activity with this 246 <br />Board, but the idea is to find out all of the different services that are provided by the County. There’s probably not 247 <br />too many Board members here that used to see the fiscal impact template that was included as part of our 248 <br />subdivision analysis. We had it for many years. It got so far out of date and it has really had a lot of weaknesses. It 249 <br />had a lot of good ideas but one of fallacies was that no matter what the school costs were there was going to be 250 <br />revenues coming in to pay for the school cost. So we got rid of that and we don’t make the decision on a 251 <br />subdivision project if it pays for itself. That’s just not our role. 252 <br /> 253 <br />Tony Blake: I have one comment because we’re voting on a bond now to fix the schools that have been neglected 254 <br />for the last 15 years that weren’t paid for and I don’t know the problems in the school budget or the problems in 255 <br />planning but I think our impact fee structure is not sufficient to maintain the schools or something is not sufficient to 256 <br />maintain the schools. And the bond seems kind of like a backdoor tax increase. I’m not against spending money on 257 <br />schools but I want to make sure that if they have a maintenance item that it should be covered and planned for and 258 <br />that’s the linkage back to here. 259 <br /> 260 <br />Craig Benedict: That’s a big topic. Our school impact fees are for new development and increasing the capacity for 261 <br />schools and capital costs like buses. The maintenance of the existing schools, we can’t use the money for those 262 <br />purposes. There has been mention of the transfer tax for people that buy and sell houses but that has other 263 <br />consequences. And then the funding formula from the state has changed and leaves the school district short. 264