DPS students call for heat pumps. How much should we listen? Impact fees: what are they? Are some unconstitutional? Who are the Sun's donors?
DPS students call for heat pumps. How much should we listen?
I'm not saying we shouldn't take students thoughts into consideration, but I am saying we should only consider what they have to say on using heat pumps in proportion to the amount they'll pay for them.
The Denverite article below details how a couple groups of DPS students -- a middle school group called the Earth Rangers and the high school group DPS Students for Climate Action -- are calling for heat pumps to be put in DPS buildings.
I'm all for students finding their passions and speaking up. I'm all for letting them have and express opinions about things. That's how we learn, it's how we form our identities and figure out our values.
What I struggle with here is how much attention should be paid. I think the best rule I could come up with here was that we should only listen to what these young folks have to say in proportion to the amount they're going to be paying to electrify school buildings.**
If they are paying the bills, let's listen carefully. If they don't pay the bills, well, thanks for your opinion and we'll take it into consideration.
**If you read the article, it makes mention of the fact that what helped spur some of these discussions was the need for air conditioning in the DPS buildings. Air conditioning needs to happen; I support that. As our school year goes longer and longer and starts sooner and sooner, some of the older buildings in the DPS system are getting hot enough to interfere with learning. That needs to be fixed. You can get AC without a heat pump, however.
https://denverite.com/2024/04/18/dps-students-want-climate-conscious-heat-pumps-on-november-ballot/
Impact fees -- what are they? Are some unconstitutional?
What is an impact fee? Take a look at the attached screenshot. Yes, I know it's from Lubbock, Texas and not Colorado, but I liked the graphic and the general theme here is transferrable.
The argument that a government would make in favor of such a thing is that as developers take things over and fix them up, this places increasing demands on government services and thus its fair to ask those that increase the demands to help fund them.
I personally think that in some of these cases this feels like government once again holding its hand out for more (and more, and yet more) money: would not a vacant lot turned restaurant increase its value for property taxes, would it not generate sales tax?
If you lived in an area where you the same government agency that had an impact fee also had property tax and sales tax, the argument that the increased demand doesn't also come with increased government revenue seems harder to sustain if you ask me.
PitkinCo may have one of its own impact fees in hot water. If you look at the first and second links below, you'll see a couple of Center Square stories on the issue.
Let's go back for some context. Pitkin County (think Aspen mostly) has an impact fee on development which is supposed to fund "affordable housing" for workers. It seems the numbers involved scale with the income, because the story in the second link below relates a story of how a man is suing over a $1 million impact fee he paid to remodel about 200 sq ft of his home's floor area.
Some other numbers on the size of the fee come from the first link, a story about how this particular fee may run afoul of a recent US Supreme Court ruling:
"The county’s most-recently updated fee subsidy calculator shows a 6,000 square foot, locally occupied unit would have a fee of almost $98,000. The same size unit that’s not locally occupied would have a fee of almost $382,000. The county estimates that the cost of its impact fee on what it described as a "second home" that was greater than 9,000 square feet was $488,047. ... For the county’s Road Impact Fee, a 1,000 square feet residential addition would amount to a $5,468.12 fee."
Wow. Just wow.
So are fees like Pitkin's unconstitutional? Maybe. As I wrote above, the first article I link to below is a discussion of whether fees like Pitkin's here are unconstitutional given a recent US Supreme Court ruling which seems to this non-lawyer to indicate that fees which don't necessarily tie to actual costs faced by the government are a no-go.
Quoting again from the first link:
"The court, using a two-part test 'modeled on the unconstitutional conditions doctrine,' said permit conditions must have 'essential nexus' [a direct connection] to a local government’s land-use interests and must have 'rough proportionality' to a development’s impact. 'A permit condition that requires a landowner to give up more than is necessary to mitigate harms resulting from new development has the same potential for abuse as a condition that is unrelated to that purpose,' the majority opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett said."
I have to say that I like the ruling here. As Justice Coney Barrett says, as I allude to above, I think it's far too tempting for governments to hide a desire to pad their coffers by using impact fees and this ruling pushes back on that.
I'll be curious to see what if any fallout there is from the US Supreme Court ruling and what impact the lawsuit by the man suing over the $1 million for 200 sq ft has on Pitkin's fee.
One last little detail. The third link below is for a bill from this legislative session that would change up how impact fees for special districts that provide emergency services (fire, ambulance) can be assessed and collected. I put in a screenshot from the fiscal note with a summary of the changes.
Quick note: read the top part of the second column of the screenshot carefully. At first I was worried this was another workaround on TABOR but you'll see language about sales tax levies only with voter consent.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_fbe6c2c2-fcff-11ee-b836-632fbbe78583.html
https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_4ab1b300-e165-11ee-afe8-5f999ba967d7.html
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-194
And, to round out the day, who are the Colorado Sun's donors?
The recent dustup between journalist Sandra Fish (of the Sun) and the Dave Williams has resulted in lots of money flowing to both the Sun and the Republican Party.
That renewed a question I'd had before but had dropped the thread on: did the Sun, since becoming a nonprofit, reveal their donors. I asked Editor Larry Ryckman on Twitter recently and he shared the link below.
Kudos to them for being forthright. I disagree with their politics, but I salute their openness in this regard. Much better than, say, the Times Recorder which doesn't.
Details in the link if you want them.