UPDATE: The Wildomar planning department had scheduled yet one more “special” meeting on the new DIF fee schedule for Wednesday, November 20th. However, the discussion and decision on DIF fees has been pushed out once again – maybe January?
It now appears the council intends to push through an inadequate DIF proposal, favorable to both developers and the building industry in time for the city council to approve it in the year-end rush, when critics of the proposal are distracted by holiday season activities.
Will they continue to give citizens short shift on these crucial fees just to attract more questionably beneficial development which doesn’t pay its own way? That’s what it looks like.
Both the County and the City have done a great disservice to the community in the past, and appear set to repeat the same mistake. A mistake which will have long term, negative ramifications for our community.
Adequate DIF fees pay for necessary infrastructure construction like fire stations, road improvements, and new or enlarged water and sewer capacity. Because of the council’s foolish decision to lower DIF fees rather than make them competitive with neighboring cities, Wildomar has fallen way behind in building or improving all sorts of infrastructure.
A short drive through the city should confirm the poor infrastructure conditions we are living with – for anyone willing to take a look.
One such example is that we have deferred building and equipping a long-needed second fire station on the East side – trading that much needed facility in for dependency on complex cooperative or reciprocal agreements with the Riverside County Police Department, Cal Fire and surrounding cities which support our fire and police protection.
These public safety services are essential, and they should be given greater priority. That does not mean we should have to pay more or special taxes for them. It means DIF fees should be raised to a competitive rate and more of the resulting city budget should be allocated to these very fundamental services.
City councils know most of their constituents feel fire and police protections are among the most important services, and our local city government often thinks these services make for easy targets to pry additional taxes out of voters.
However, voters want better solutions than adding a whopping new tax to their bills. Now is the time for the Wildomar city council to recognize that their citizens want developers to pay enough DIF fees to pay for the infrastructure that is required to support any expansion of our housing and population. New projects should not get away with just being revenue neutral.
More new taxes are not an acceptable answer! Development must be made to pay for these requirements!
The WildomarWatcher 