Public Hearing to Consider Adoption of  Resolution Amending Master Fee Resolution No. 12191 to Add New and to Revise Existing Planning, Building and Public Works Fees.  (Building 481001 and Public Works 4210310)
Okay. Thank you. And thanks for all the good work, all of you out there and staff and also the public for all your great input. Okay. We are moving on to six C. Public hearing to consider adoption of resolution amending Master P resolution number 12191 to add new and revise existing planning, building and public works fees. You're back. I'm back. I'm just doing that. I'm just going to do the Vanna White portion here. This is. I'm going to Madam Chair Council. And for Thomas, what we have before you tonight is a public hearing to consider adoption of a resolution amending our master fee resolution to add new and revised planning, building and public works fees. This is a required exercise. We charge fees for services under state law. We have to check in on those fees every five years. We have to make sure in that study that we are not overcharging. This is a fee for service. It's not a fee to make money. It's a fee to cover the costs of providing a service to people who need permits under either local or state law to make improvements to their property. We also want to check to make sure we're not under charging under council. Council policy is to make sure that we are getting cost recovery. So if somebody needs a service, they need to come to city hall to get a permit or a service. We need to make sure that we are accurately charging them for the cost of that service so that the general fund or that other residents of the city through their general fund are not sort of subsidizing those costs for them. So that's what we're doing. We're checking to make sure that our fees are accurate. And once again, these are fees are not designed to make the city money. These are just to cover the cost of a service. We did this this we do this every five years this year. We did it in partnership with public works. So what you have is planning building, which is the planning building and Transportation Department. But we also did it joined forces with public works because they needed to update their fees as well. This was an important exercise because there's really probably no two departments in Alameda that work more closely together. I mean, most projects and any projects of any size require permits from both planning, building and public works. So we want to make that process as seamless as possible for the for the customer. And so we also tried to sort of make sure that our fee structure works well together. Something else that I know this is important to the council and something we were working on constantly and also causes the need for adjustments in fees . We're constantly working on efficiencies. How do we make our processes more streamlined? How do we make it more efficient? This reduces the cost of the fees. It also just makes us all much more productive and makes the experience for the customer just much better. And you know, it's good for both the city. We meant spend less staff time processing permits and it's good for the customer. They they get their permits faster and they spend less, less to get them. I'm going to now turn this over to Greg McFadden, our building official, who has been here even longer than I have and has been through this process, I think four times. He's going to talk a little bit about the planning and building changes. And then Scott Wickstrom, your capable city engineer, is going to come up and take us. There is take a couple of minutes to talk about the public works fees and what's changed there. We're all available to answer questions if you have any. Thank you, Mr. Thomas again. Gaming getting fancy building official quickly. The building fees were currently when we did the fee study and when we did the fee study, we look at all of our fees and we talk to staff and we look at how long it takes to do the process, processing the permanent, the counter inspections, the whole gamut. And so that's what we've been doing for the last few months, is looking at those, figuring out what it takes to do a permit and then figuring out based on that, what, what we need to charge based on, say, we've determined that the building department is currently recovering about 80% of their fees, their costs. We were charging an hourly rate of about $156. We're looking at charge of $200. There's not a lot of changes to the building fees that pretty say we made a few we added a couple, but not a lot of changes. The increases really for building are were to code cycles since the last fee study. One of the big changes that's come into play is the green building code, which has added quite a bit of new requirements on both residential commercial buildings. So there's more time involved in inspections and planning check and and staff cost increase over five years. So that's where you get the increase in the building code planning has gone from a 60% cost covering up 200%. Their hourly fee would change from $184 to $216. And our planning has done some more or more significant changes. One of the main ones is going from more deposits to more flat fees so that there's a surety of what you're being charged when you come in for a permit. So you get a deposit and it's sort of out there and you don't really know. There's a lot of staff time in tracking the time and then billing sort of flat fees. And we're able to do this by looking at what we've done over the past five years has been particularly busy the last five years. We have some good numbers, so we were able to determine what those flatfish could be. So planning just got a lot more flat fees. We've done some streamlining, looked at items that we don't need to do as significant a review on. We're instituting some online permitting from a building standpoint and from planning standpoint. We take a lot of plans in electronically any of the big projects we've done, all the side projects have been submitted electronically. We're not taking in the big rolls of plans until the end when we need a copy for inspectors in the staff. So we've cut down a lot on the planning. We wish we had done that with Domani because we have some enormous rolls in the vault waiting to go. But they've been there for, as you say, quite a while. That's the big changes in planning building. I'm going to turn it over to Scott. Good evening, madam, and members of the Council. My name's Scott Wickstrom, City Engineer. I'll talk briefly about the changes to the Public Works Office. We do work closely with planning and building. However, we're quite a bit different in terms of the scope of projects that we look at. We very much are narrow to public right away and while building will issue well over 3000 permits per year, planning looks at over 500 some odd applications and various permit reviews. We have about 40 ongoing projects impact the public right away. So what we're trying to do with this fee studying the changes in here is actually go the opposite direction of planning department and from a fixed fee and doing more towards hourly based. These 40 projects are really the big projects are the site there are the new warehouses out on Harbor Bay for one of the challenge projects and aluminum arena. It's hard to really judge what the scope of that work is going to be. The best way to accurately collect our costs is to basically come up with a fee study and then bill hourly for our efforts. Our rate does increase from 182 to $192 per hour and following a similar methodology that the other departments were done. One thing that we are making a bit of a departure and we are looking to explicitly subsidize some permits are for encroachment permits for residential properties. If you have a broken flag, a concrete or a couple of broken flags concrete up front, most homeowners are find it to be very expensive to one hire the contractor. One of the things that we realize from our standpoint when we go through and also inspect that work and plan, check and go through all the reviews in the process because of the liability that we incur from the city, it takes a fair amount of time and effort for us to the point where that cost of our permit would be almost equal to the cost of the improvement, which means that the work gets done on Saturday or Sunday without benefit of a permit, without benefit of inspection, and not necessarily to city standards. So we are making a move to explicitly subsidize that. It's a relatively small proportion of the amount of work that we do in a relatively small amount of year, the total cost recovery that we do. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions of staff? And we have no public comments. So council discussion. Did you have a staff question? I can ask it under discussion. You can ask it now. You're on. Site. And I spoke with the city manager about this. I well, since we're in discussion, I'll say first up, this is a great report, makes the case for how the fees that you're suggesting make sense from a cost recovery point of view. What I found missing in the report was who is being impacted by this and what is that impact? I appreciate our city engineers pointing out that the public works fees are really mostly very large projects for the most part, etc. So on the planning and building fees, can we do we have some idea of that? These are everybody, right? That was what you told me earlier. But what the impact of this increase is to a a norm, you know, a homeowner who is renovating your bathroom. Absolutely. You can sort of decipher it from the tables. But what thank you for the heads up. Greg was able to come up with sort of some simple projects, and there's a handout here that. You're better deciphering than I think. So we we did we put together three fairly typical projects that we see come to the counter and looked at what the current planning fee planning building fees would be and what the proposed would be. So the first one is a residential addition, 450 square feet that a $75,000 valuation design reviews required. So the current design review fee is $3,000 going forward as a flat fee, it's a 2860 filing fee goes up from 208 to 264. You can see planned check goes up, inspection goes up a bit. So the total cost goes from about 5100 to almost 50 $600. So that's the impact on that type of project. Commercial tenant improvement. Nonstructural says no new structural walls 2500 square feet with a window change. So in this case we have design review exemption. It still gets looked at to make sure it's consistent with the guidelines. But there's there's no design review process, $150,000 valuation. You can see the design review fee went up a bit. Filing stays the same as the previous example. Planned check is pretty flat and building inspection goes up about $400. So we've got about a 600, 550, $600 increase in that permit. The last one is a bigger project, new multi-family residential construction, four story 5200 square feet, $1.4 million on two acres with design review. This would be consistent with one of the buildings at BLOCK nine. Inside a design review was a $500 fee with time and materials $184 an hour. We'd be looking to have a flat fee or a initial fee of 2868 within the time materials at $216 an hour. So the real change there is slightly larger flat fee, with an increase in the hourly cost building permit inspections go up again based on that and the total cost is up about $3,000. That's just an example of three that we came up with. Thank you. I so first off, I mean, I asked just everybody in the business. I asked this question about 330 this year. Appreciate how quickly and how detailed you got the design review is that the from the from the looks of it it doesn't matter whether you are a residential or commercial or huge building a new thing . The design review is 2868 flat. Yeah. It's let me just clarify on the big project when when when there's a there's a flat and plus time in materials that's essentially a deposit. Okay. So got it. Your big project comes in, we start tracking our hours that the first minute if we if your project actually only turn takes 6 hours, well we'll take it out of the initial deposit. Okay. All right. If you're just redoing some windows, but they need some sort of approval, but they don't need design review because they look just the same as the ones that are there. Do we think that this kind of 8% increase in 8 to 9% increase in. For the exemption? I'm just wondering, this is a $75,000 project, but I'm sure you get a lot of just rewiring a couple of like light fixtures, kind of really small projects. Do we think that the the scale, which seems to be about 8%, is about the same for tiny project? Yeah the the the hourly when we looked at the these projects are small project with changes of lights. The hourly time was the same the the hourly charge went up. So that's the difference you'd see is the difference between 156 and $200 an hour would be the difference you'd see in that type of project. It was like a 25% increase for those tiny. For those small. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Councilmember Day, sir. Well, thank you. I certainly had the same concerns about possible impacts to what I will call the smaller scale projects, particularly projects done by homeowners or property owners. In looking at the report, particularly the appendix. It seems to me a way to systematically get at that is to one. Ex for me accept the modifications with regard to the planning division. Because when you look at the tables in the appendix A1, when you look at, for example, the first table and A1, the third table and A1 and the fourth table in A1, the nature of the fees that are being referred to there are largely kind of larger projects, the type of fees that are being discussed. The second part, the second table identifies the type of fees that. Could potentially be smaller. Projects. But by and large, I look at the type of fees that are being discussed and they're Appendix A1 Planning Division. It seems to be the larger projects. When you go into the building division though, you look at the appendices and you look at a range that I think there's fees with regard to flagpoles, for example, fees with regard to fences. So a lot of the fees that are associated there do seem to be kind of a smaller scale projects, but not all, because there are some fees within the building division that refer to new construction. So new construction is by and large going to be a pretty big project. But but what's also distinguished there, though, is remodeling. So. And the second thing about the fees within the building division as indicated in the front end of the staff report, but also as indicated on the on a detailed basis in the appendices, is that , you know, the cost recovery is 80%. I mean, it's not 100%, but 80% ain't bad compared to, I say, the cost recovery of what's what's happening in public works or or in the planning division. So one thing that I would suggest is that within the building division that we might my druthers is to not just any fees that have a cost recovery of 78% or higher, but if there is a fee within the building division that has cost recovery of less than than 78%, you know, adjust that either to 100% or 78%, whatever. So that would be my druthers and also to to adjust anything having to do with new construction, whether new construction for single family homes or new construction for industrial or commercial, but for remodels of residential. I would keep at it. I would keep it a 78. I mean, because from my vantage point, an 80% cost recovery is pretty good. I just I understand, you know, sort of where you're going. A couple of things. One, just the numbers that Scott talked about. Alamy we do a few big projects a year. The lion's share of the expense that you as a city spend to process permits and the money that we bring in to cover those costs is the small projects. It's those small I mean, if you think about our projects, it's it's like a pyramid. There's a few big ones that we all talk about and we argue about it in public hearings. And then there's the rest of the pyramid, which is all the little ones, and that's really the bread and butter. So when you say or when you think about the option of saying, well, let's not try to get full cost recovery on the small ones, you're talking about a huge portion of the pyramid. And so what does that mean? It means that one of the other things that the council has adopted in the past is their need, because the planning building department is completely fee based. So we're our plan and our our whole mission in life is to operate this service without having to use general fund money. It's but we also are preparing for cycles. And what happened in the recession was the cycle went down and immediately we just had to start essentially laying people off and stop doing the kinds of work that the council and the planning board still wanted us to do, like updating the general plan and doing the zoning changes and or doing things that would help us get out of the recession. And it got tricky. So one of the things that you've done, which is smart, is said we got to build in a rainy day fund because there are going to be cycles. So you need to build up a reserve. So the way when we go at 80%, what you're basically saying is just eat away the reserve. I mean, that's what's going to happen if we don't get 100% cost recovery as close as possible. It means that our ability to build a reserve is going to be severely hampered because we're essentially going to be digging into the reserve to cover that extra 21% for the lion's share of the projects. And once we eat away the entire reserve, then we're going to be coming back to you basically with our out saying, hey . We have no more reserve member reserve right now is 800, about 800,000. I mean, we'll burn through that and then it'll be like, okay, time to either raise the fees back up to get her percent or open up the general fund and start subsidizing through your general fund the services that we're providing at the counter. So that's the downside of not pushing to the to the, you know, up to the levels we're talking about now. Just come in that I would not be able to support my colleague's proposal because I very much appreciate the work that all three of these departments did. And I do want to know that the policies we have in place, the fees were charging, have been streamlined, have been updated and modernized. And I, I think that it is entirely reasonable to have these charges. And, again, we look at all the things we want to do. In our last report, we told Andrew more than once, if you need new staff, you know, more staff, let us know. And at the same time, we would say 78% recovery is good enough. I, I think there's a lot of ways that homeowners can finance home improvements. Sometimes you take out a home equity loan, and we do know that property in this area has appreciated greatly in the last decade or so. But I think we do need to keep an eye on our city's budget. But we have a bit of housekeeping to do because it's 5 minutes to 11 and we need a motion and we need four votes to pass to to pass it to be able to consider new items. We have the item nine, which is Councilmember de Suggs Referral Council referral, and then we have ten, which is an update on the Emma Hood streams that are items. So do I have a motion to go past 11 from the tired is looking person up here or. I'd make a motion I'd like the update on on my hood. I'm wondering if Councilmember Desai wouldn't mind if we could continue his item to another meeting. Uh, the only thing is this. We continued from two meetings ago. Okay, I'm just. I'm. My feet are swelling up. I've been sitting for a long time. I'm not feeling great, so I may leave. Well, if we could do it the first part of the meeting, that would. I'd love that. I wouldn't mind. Well, counselor, referrals have a place to go. But will. I mean, I don't know what our next agenda looks like yet, so I would certainly I want to hear your item, too, but I could. Can I make a suggestion. Please? Vice Mayor. Could we continue to go to Monday night's meeting? Allow me to point. After we only have one conversation, which is kind of to say, because we then just quickly talk about it there. Well, that's a public meeting. The problem is, I don't think you necessarily have the kind of public access that this has tonight. It's not going to be televised, for instance, for people who aren't there. But I mean, that's certainly a suggestion. Okay. Do I have a motion to go past 11 with two items with one item, someone make a motion or no motion? Well. I would move two items. Is there a second? Sure. Can we be quick, though? Okay. Okay. Do we can we can even set a stop stop time, can't we? That we can say we're not going past 1130. 1120. I just I just I just want to flag that this one actually has some discussion that is key and timely. Do you think it's reasonable that we could go to 1130? Depends how long the hotel takes longer. So it's a. Relatively. It's just a council referral or not? Yeah. Okay. So do I have a motion that we continue the meeting to 1130 to consider these two items? Okay. You're making the motion council member dated July 2nd and seconded. Okay, we have a motion. We have a second on favor, I. Okay. How many eyes was that when I did? For medical reasons. Okay. So I got four. Okay, so let's. Let's. Let's let's talk fast. About the. Approval of this item. All right. This there's a motion to approve item 60. Do I have a second? Second? It's been moved and seconded. All in favor. Hi. Oh, did Melissa just shoot? Okay. Oh. Do you want to ask what it would be? As for. Yeah. No. Can I. Can I. What? While we were waiting for. Councilmember, could we please hear the swim center so that if she wants to leave before the hotel. Okay, so we had a motion in a second and we were voting on approving item six. See. I'd like to have a discussion. Discussion. So, you know, I think my concern is that the we just talked about the cost of use. We just talked about the cost of trying to streamline and who this who these fees get passed to. I understand that, you know, we're trying to bring some of the fees in line, but there are some fees. My concern is if our fees are too high. We've already heard from renters who've said they're afraid to report certain things. And now we're adding to the cost of that. And I think that we do have to think about where that comes from. I'm all for trying to get to cost recovery, but I do have a concern where inflation is, you know, half of basically what are some of our fees are and frankly, a quarter or, you know, a fifth of what some of our other fee increases are. So I do have some concerns relative to that. And I think that we're missing the mark when it comes to I think, you know, I'm for trying to streamline it and get those increases, but I think we're trying to do a lot in one cycle. And I would like to know a little bit more about, you know, how we think we're going to actually go about enforcing or or getting people to comply and how we think it's going to impact things like our ADOS and stuff like that. I would like to note that on the historic preservation side, you know, if you need a certificate of approval by the Historic Advisory Board, I mean, those fees are going up substantially and we already have a lot of issues. You know, with with timeliness and getting that board together and things like that. So can I just quickly. I think our recommendation is set your fees to cover your cost, however we do. And the last item with the hearing, people talk about the process to build things, the amount of time we need to discuss things. I guess what I'm asking the council to do is you should adopt full cost recovery, but then you should also make it very clear to staff. Keep working on streamlining these processes. Move more of these projects from the design review plus time and materials to the design review exemption category. Find ways so that you're getting full cost recovery. But the permit doesn't require a certificate of approval. With a public hearing at the Historic Advisory Board, it can be approved by staff, and that's just that. What's the adjustment? What's the timeline for that? And where are we going to see those comparisons in terms of the timeline or those projects getting cut down or streamlined? Well, we can I mean, we can be processing changes to these every single one of these changes is a change to the municipal code. So it's changing a process. It's cutting out a public hearing requirement. It's setting it's setting design review exemptions. And we've been doing this consistently over the last few years. We've been getting better. But if you need us to speed that up, we we. Certainly I think I could agree that we do. And I would also add that even if we don't do it, Sacramento may in the near future. And I would I mean, I would just like to say that in my opinion that that needs to come with and with this ask for an increase in fees. I think that saying that we're going to come back, I would like to know when that's going to come back and when we're going to at least review it , perhaps with staff coding some of the more major or more impactful ones. I guess that we have a lot of them. And my ask would be that we get a handful of them, you know, maybe what are the top two or three that we think could make the biggest impact? And there's some things that we can we've already been talking about in terms of prioritizing, in terms of the climate action thing, like, you know, how do you streamline, you know, energy efficiency changes, Windows, things like that. Would homeowners want to do? So I think with the climate action, we'll start. With both an eye to the timing, not wanting to keep my colleague out much later and also making sure we're staying within the parameters of the item that was was noticed before us. We do have a motion. We do have a second. All in favor. Yes, it was made and seconded. Yes, right. Yes. Okay. Okay. All in favor. I opposed. No. Okay. The motion passes 3 to 2. Thank you. Okay, now we will move on to the City Manager Communications. In the interests of time, I could move mine to the end so that you can get to the other two items. Okay. You get done by 1130. Thank you, Mr. Levitt. And do we have any oral communications? Not agenda? No. So then we move on to council referrals. Item nine, a couple more days.