Randal Westacott, Building Official

FY2023 Proposed New and Modified User Fees with a proposed effective date of September 1, 2022.

ADOPT RESOLUTION NO. 2022-2260 APPROVING AND ADOPTING A DOCUMENT ENTITLED THE GOODYEAR MUNICIPAL USER FEE SCHEDULE REPLACING AND SUPERSEDING THE MUNICIPAL USER FEE SCHEDULE ADOPTED BY RESOLUTION NO. 2021-2167 AS AMENDED; PROVIDING FOR AN EFFECTIVE DATE. (Doug Sandstrom, Finance Director)

The modifications to Tier 1 will introduce a flat fee to reduce costs and remaining changes will reduce consumer costs.  The proposed changes will have an immaterial impact on total Building Safety Fee collections.

On July 12, 2021, the Mayor and City Council of the City of Goodyear approved Resolution No. 2021-2167, approving and adopting user fees and cost recovery rates a document entitled Goodyear Municipal User Fee Schedule as recommended by staff.

Per A.R.S. §9-499.15 all fees were noticed on our website on May 19, 2022, with a copy provided to the Clerk's office and additionally noticed on June 30, 2022, complying with all required notifications procedures.

On an annual basis it is our intent to update the entire city fee schedule to account for any changes which occurred throughout the year, as well as, any proposed new changes.  This process will adopt the entire schedule so that we have one main resolution that the majority of the city fees are based upon.  For the current update the only new changes being proposed relate to Building Safety Permit Fees.

The proposed changes are shown in attachment 1 - Proposed New/Modified Fee Summary.  The intent behind these changes is to:
1)  Simplify and reduce the cost of the lowest level of permits.  This encourages more people to get a permit for simple things up to $10,000 in valuation - it is a flat $100 fee with no extras charges as is currently the case.
2)  Correct Table 1a - there was an error in the calculations so that a project with a valuation of $999,000 would pay a fee of $8,079 (Fee B7) yet a project valued at $1,000,000 (Fee B8) would start with a fee of $7,042.
     a.  Additionally, for the permits over $1.0 million the fee per $1,000 of valuation over $1.0 million was incorrectly listed as per $5,000.
3)  All the other changes are to clarify how fees are being charged based on DSD experience over the past year.

All adjustments result in a net reduction of fees with the exception of #2 above which results in relatively small incremental changes for the largest of our projects.  Due to the size of these projects a very limited number of projects hit this fee level.  Following these changes our fees will remain on par with our neighboring cities as shown in the table below:
 

Project Values	Goodyear	Avondale	Buckeye	Peoria	Surprise	Glendale	Phoenix
$10,000	$202	$391	$353	$311	$219	$400	$462
>$1,000,000	$3/$1000	$5/$1000	$5/$1000	$3.65/$1000	$5/$1000	$4.62/$1000	$4/$1000
@$2,000,000	$11,116	$12,947	$13,329	$9,310	$5,100	$11,710	$11,201

Table 1-A: The current Building Permit Fees are broken into a seven (7) tier structure.  The range of tier 1 and tier 2 are being restructured to broaden the fee range to assist smaller projects by simplifying the process and reducing fees.  The proposed modification will make Tier 1 a flat fee and will not require a plan review fee. Reducing complexity and cost for these smaller projects will also help to encourage people to get permits and provide us the opportunity to impact life safety throughout our community. Tiers 2 through 7 are adjusted to build upon the expanded range of Tier 1 and to ensure that each Tier level starting amount is equal to the top of the lower Tier cost. In addition to correcting the starting point for Tier 7, this modification also corrects the incremental charge to the originally intended $3 per $1,000 as opposed to $3 per $5,000.  As proposed these adjustments are on par with neighboring communities.

Table 1-B: The Miscellaneous Permit Fees are being adjusted to reflect the new range structure in Table 1A.  This modification ensures that this fee is only charged for permits greater than $10,000; removing the confusion of having different plan review fees for existing residential.

B109 - Fire Permit Fees and Plan review Fees: Verbiage is being changed to clarify and simplify the Fire Plan Review Fee.  

Table 1-F: Automatic Fire Sprinkler System fee and Fire Plan Review Fees verbiage is being changed for clarification; We have eliminated a per story additional cost to use a flat rate for area and also eliminated “new installation in existing structure” to make it less complex. And, we have removed fire plan review fees from projects that have little review time associated with them.

Table 1-G: Solar Photovoltaic System Permits still reflects 15% fee but verbiage is being added to clarify point of reference in rate structure Table 1A. A commercial solar project could easily be in the multi-millions of dollars - the intent of this fee was to tie to table 1A valuation as opposed to 15% of the contract cost.