SC General Assembly Must Amend Impact Fee Law to Allow Local Government Freedom

By Paul Gable

Horry County Council is again wrestling with the question of how to raise impact fees to help offset the cost of providing needed infrastructure to serve the ever-increasing number of new homes being built in the county.

While county council investigates to increase impact fees, the state enabling legislation governing those fees provides the largest hurdle to overcome.

In 1999, the General Assembly passed legislation governing the imposition of impact fees by local governments with enough restrictions and obstacles to make them virtually unworkable for local government use. The development industry launched a huge lobbying effort against the law and was generally successful in making the law extremely difficult for local governments to use.

The legislation dictates how the local governments must use the money and in what time frame it must be used. It also requires commercial structures to be treated the same as homes with respect to taxing, something that makes impact fees on commercial structures an excessive burden.

Two amendments, allowing homes to be addressed by the local government without the requirement to include commercial structures and allowing local governments to use the money in any way they decide best meets their needs for infrastructure and service improvements to offset the demands of development, would solve the problems in the current law.

County council has periodically asked the local legislative delegation to amend the impact fee law with no effect. Senator Luke Rankin has been representing county residents in his senate district since 1993. He was in the Senate when the law initially passed and has done nothing to help local governments by attempting to change the law since.

In the wake of no help from the likes of Sen. Rankin, Rep. Alan Clemmons and Rep. Russell Fry, when they were in office in the SC House and their close buddy, Rep. Heather Crawford, local governments have had to raise property taxes on all citizens and resort to things like local option sales tax RIDE programs, again hitting all citizens, to raise money to help meet the local needs caused by an increasing population.

It appears legislators, like those mentioned above, are quite happy to see property taxes on their constituents continue to rise, something they can blame on local governments, instead of acting proactively to help those constituents.