EDITORIAL
Impact fee system promises to be positive

The Honolulu City Council's work on a new impact fee system for development in 'Ewa may signal a healthy change in the history of growth and planning on O'ahu.

It has the promise of creating stability and rationality to what has all too often been an ad hoc approach to development on the Island.

As this proposal moves forward, it is imperative that city officials work closely with landowners, developers, land-use experts, environmentalists and others to create a system that works best for all concerned.

Briefly, the City Council is looking at imposing a dollar-specific set of impact fees for new housing, retail, industrial, office and hotel developments in the 'Ewa/Kapolei area.

Those fees would be used to offset local costs of crucial infrastructure improvements, primarily road and highway improvements.

There are several singular elements to this plan:

• It represents an unusual degree of city-state cooperation. The city would collect the impact fees through its permitting process, but the money would go into a trust fund that would front the local share of what are primarily state highway improvements, such as interchanges.

This is a rare example of one level of government helping another solve a difficult transportation problem.

One of the last times there was such cooperation was during the Waihe'e administration, when the state laid the necessary legal groundwork for the city to raise a tax that would pay for a mass-transit system. The tax proposal failed and with it the spirit of state-city cooperation.

Ideally, this effort will lead to many more such cooperative efforts that might lead to the day when O'ahu no longer has largely duplicative and even sometimes competitive state and city road and highway operations.

• It moves the business of impact fees, or exactions, from the ad hoc and secretive system of backroom deliberations into something that is open and standard for all the players. It will also create a level playing field for all developers.

In the past, developers who came in for permits during boom times faced substantial demands from government, while those who were willing to go ahead during down economic times were greeted with much lighter requirements. That creates a fundamental inequality.

• It will help ensure that basic public infrastructure, which includes roads, power lines, parks and perhaps even facilities such as schools, will be developed in tandem with the private development. In the past, private development too often leapfrogged the ability of the public facilities to service it.

For the long-suffering residents of Kapolei and 'Ewa, the key infrastructure needs are road and intersection improvements so people and goods can get in and out. Thus, that is the focus of this set of proposed impact fees.

In other areas, in other developments, the needs may be different. But the process could work equally well. Done right, this could add a refreshing new level of rationality to the planning and development process on O'ahu. It should proceed.