A recent article in the Arkansas Gazette had a past president of Little Rock’s Home Builders Association complaining about our opposition to LR city hall's tax proposal because the city refuses to reform their policies and institute impact fees for future outward development.
Mr Wingfield's exact quote was...
" But Wingfield, like many developers, oppose special impact fees because they’re already paying for much of the infrastructure. In Little Rock, subdivision developers are responsible for building neighborhood streets, and sometimes commercial developers are responsible for widening roads leading to their properties.
Wingfield, however, does support City Hall’s sales-tax increase proposal.
Now, lets just fill in some of the blanks that he conveniently left out of the conversation.
Yes, he is right, the city requires that they put in the streets to their development...good idea huh, otherwise if the city had to wait a while to do it...how do his buyers get to their property???? yet here is a more important fact he left out of the conversation, the only reason he can build these new houses is because you and me paid to have the water and sewer lines put under those streets he is paying to build to his development. I do not have the numbers but I am pretty sure that he gets the better deal!!!!
Another point, what he is talking about is on-site development cost. But as we see now, after he and his buds have done 5 or 10 of these outward developments...THEN we find out we have to have a new park for these new residents, and we need police to patrol these areas that continue to grow further out from the central city, and with this comes the need to have a substation for these outward police patrols...oops then we need new fire stations with new fire personnel to man them. These are just some of the off-site cost that developers are never required to pay for with their developments that keep moving further and further outward as they follow the cheaper land prices for their developments.
So now we find ourselves in the present day circumstances....
with all the on-site cost of sewer and water etc. the city has to pay for there is little to no funds available to pay for all the off-site cost that the accumulating outward developments have now created a need for. Solution, raise everyone's taxes so we can get these off-site needs in place and put a few band-aides over the established infrastructure that has been neglected for decades to accommodate this outward development.
So, moral of the story....if you vote for that tax and make everything OK for the boys and girls at city hall, as well as those developers that are getting their resources on the cheap... and this is what is likely destined for your future if you stay in Little Rock...
10 to 15 years from now, after those developers have doubled their outward development from where it is now, LR city hall will be back in front of you again to ask you to vote for higher taxes to pay for new fire stations, parks, and police needs that have arisen, mysteriously, in even further west and southwest Little Rock developments, with a little teaser to do some work on those same streets they will do with this tax but have decade again by then. Amazing....huh???
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