Diamondback Prints RTCP Op-ed on Impact Fee Waiver
The Diamondback printed today RTCP’s own blistering account of the School Facilities Impact Fee Waiver bill being considered in Annapolis today and tomorrow (read our first report on this). While the undergraduate and graduate student governments may not agree with the specific rhetoric in today’s Op-ed, they stand firmly with us in opposition to this and any plan that would drastically reduce the only incentive for student housing in the area. We’ll be in Annapolis tomorrow with student leaders to give testimony against the bill and propose a plan that takes into consideration the interests of the 35,000 UMD students that were never consulted during the bill’s drafting.
>>Diamondback - No End in Sight by David Daddio
Not far north on Route 1, just past the used-car dealerships, the psychic shop, the tattoo parlor, the rubble of a brothel and a restaurant that fell victim to an arson, sleeps a homeless man in a tent on a wooded lot. He’s taken up residency in our beautiful college town - College Park. Ironically, this man lives in the very same place that 630 graduate students were set to move to in August 2007 - the Mazza Grandmarc apartment complex. Instead, nearly 10 months after the project’s approval, the developer remains embroiled in a bitter fight over a little-known and little-understood law that gives incentives for off-campus student housing: the public school facilities impact fee waiver (henceforth referred to as the extortion fee waiver). Two committees in Annapolis are poised to reconsider (read: gut) the very same incentive this week with a bill championed by local elected officials.
In 2002, the state passed a law that shielded developers from new private student housing complexes from Prince George’s County’s $7,000 per-unit impact fee. All they need to do is build within 1.5 miles of the campus and contract with Shuttle-UM for bus service. It’s not uncommon for counties to shift the burden of building new public schools by levying such a one-time fee on new development. The extortion fee waiver is based on a fairly simple concept - you pay for what you use, and you don’t pay for anything you don’t need. Should we, as students of the university, have to foot the bill for local public schools even though the vast majority of us have no children, are not from Prince George’s County and more than likely will never live here upon graduation?Local elected officials, not surprisingly, don’t see things the same way and have insisted on reducing the scope of the 2002 law since it went into effect without their consultation. Led by state Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel) and the county delegation, with the support of the College Park City Council, they have proposed to rework and narrow the 1.5-mile standard. Basically, they are using the boundaries of the waiver zone to further their own agenda of minimizing new student housing along Route 1. What once extended from the campus to the Capital Beltway and clear around to Hyattsville has been reduced in the proposed legislation to effectively two places: the Knox Boxes south of the campus and the west side of Route 1 from the university’s Northgate to Route 193. The former is undergoing property consolidation, but large-scale development is years and years away. The latter is a prime area for student housing, but the land is already almost completely filled out with proposals for hotels and city-mandated owner-occupied condos.
If you’re thinking the extortion fee waiver is just giving away money to greedy developers, think again. Although the bill before the committees in Annapolis maintains the Mazza Grandmarc’s eligibility for the waiver, were the fee to be levied, it would cost that project’s developer nearly $1.8 million. Consider University View. If that project were to be built today, its 353 units would be subject to a more than $2.7 million fee. Because that money is so central to the financing of projects and the developers’ required profit margin, the waiver can mean the difference between build and no-go.
This bill implicitly tells the university that it should take up responsibility for student housing, but unfortunately, Annapolis has virtually foreclosed that option already by requiring the university’s dorms to be self-financing. Nothing could be more ironic than a full vote on this bill in Annapolis not even a month after student leaders and university administrators paraded through the Statehouse for Terrapin Pride Day. They reportedly chanted “Go Terps” and played up the university’s academic and athletic achievements while schmoozing with state officials. Now the same state officials, some of whom we voted into office on student-friendly platforms in November, are shamelessly and quietly chipping away our last best chance at decent, affordable housing.
Let this bill be a lesson to us all that political power is hoarded by a few to the detriment of many. That’s how it will always be until exposed to the light. This is especially true for college students who come to a place for a short time and have relatively weak, high-turnover political organizations. Absolutely no student leaders were consulted or in any way involved during the drafting of this bill. Who loses most from this legislation? Future students, of course, who are not around to mount any kind of fight.
Amid the worst housing crunch in recent memory, students are being squeezed out of housing from every direction: rent stabilization, owner occupancy requirements and now potentially a second and damaging blow from Annapolis - a complete gutting of the extortion fee waiver. College Park is on the threshold of a massive economic renaissance, yet, from everything I can tell, students are being left further and further behind. At least that homeless man on the Mazza property has somewhere to live.
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March 6th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
“Should we, as students of the university, have to foot the bill for local public schools even though the vast majority of us have no children, are not from Prince George’s County and more than likely will never live here upon graduation?”
March 6th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
I think that quote alone shows the ignorance of the entire editorial.
One of the major issues with Prince George’s County (merely “a livable community”) is the horrible public schools. While I agree with most of the opinions of this site in other articles, that smart growth will enhance this community, I feel that you have missed the point on this issue, David. One of the major reasons that I, a UMCP graduate from the class of 2001 who has been a homeowner in College Park since 2003, will be moving out of this area before my kids reach school age, is because of the lack of decent public schools. How can we expect this area to improve and create a community for young professionals to live among the campus population if there are not decent public schools to send our children to. I can understand why residents and politicians would want the builders of these communities to share the burden. While the students living in these communities may not be directly receiving a gain from the school subsidy, they indirectly benefit from the possibility of improving the overall community in which they live.
To put it simply, you can’t try to turn College Park into Bethesda if you don’t improve the community around it and create a place people actually want to live.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Private student housing developments fund the local schools anyway since these developments, though exempt from the one-time school impact fee, must pay regular property taxes anyway.
Mr. Rosapepe’s bill, which would only exacerbate the university’s housing woes, will hopefully meet its defeat.
March 7th, 2007 at 12:00 am
As for mp’s comments, one should note that only developments meant to house students of the university get the exemption from the one-time fee. Development projects in the same area that are intended to house non-students are not exempt from the school impact fee.
Furthermore, it is ironic that one would urge students to support making student housing projects even more expensive as a chartable measure to the community when one openly admits that he, himself, will be “moving out of this area before my kids reach school age.”
Additionally, it looks as though the county delegation is pursuing this bill not because it wants more money for PG schools, but because it wants to direct student housing to a much smaller area directly adjacent the campus.
Lastly, if Prince George’s County really wanted better schools, the voters would repeal their property tax cap and pay more in taxes to better fund their school system, which only spends $9,600 per student (compared to $12,600 in DC and Montgomery County, $15,800 in Alexandria, $16,400 in Arlington County, and $11,900 in Fairfax County).
March 7th, 2007 at 10:59 am
While Prince George’s has a tax cap it also has a high tax rate relative to other areas. When you couple the fact that Prince George’s has a significantly lower income level than other metropolitan area jurisdictions and a far smaller tax base per capita than these jurisdictions, particularly because of the lack of office buildings and high end shopping, reducing the funding gap is a difficult process.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Why no full text RSS feed? It’d be really nice to be able to read your full posts in my feed reader without clicking through to your page. Other than that, keep up the good work.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Since we are not profiting off this site, we prefer that blog aggregators who use advertising do not profit off our material. Indeed we are about $150 in the hole thus far and if we do decide to start running google ads, we want folks to be in the habit of actually visiting the website. Sorry.
March 9th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
“While Prince George’s has a tax cap it also has a high tax rate relative to other areas.”
My property taxes are now $4,800 a year, $400 a month.
This is enough! My house is modest.
I really do not think the school system needs more money.