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04/24/2019 09:00 AMThe Guilford Board of Selectmen (BOS) is set to discuss change to the current building permit fee system in town at an upcoming meeting. The proposed changes, while not yet revealed, are designed to update the structure and price of building permit fees in town.
For the past several months, Selectman Louis Federici and other town officials have been looking at ways to update the town’s building permit fee structure. At the BOS meeting on April 15, First Selectman Matt Hoey said Federici is almost ready to make a presentation.
“This plan has been vetted and it is modeled off some of our neighbors, particularly the North Haven model,” he said. “It’s based on value and gets us away from this alphabet soup list of different permits for different things, and not that this is the primary motivation, but it will result in increased building department revenues.”
The current building permit fee system is, in large part, grounded in square footage. Hoey said a value system that considers the cost of a project rather than the size is more common and is easier for everyone to understand.
“All of our neighbors in the greater New Haven area are using a value-based structure,” he said. “It’s also easier for contractors and homeowners to know what the fee is going to be based on the value of the improvement.”
Hoey said a local contractor brought the need to review the current system to this administrations attention shortly after it took office.
“These value systems have been in place for a number of years in the surrounding towns and ironically it was early in our tenure on this board that I was approached by a roofing contractor in town and he said that we were missing the ball, that as a community we were the outlier,” he said.
Hoey said changing the system will not harm local contractors.
“The previous administration, I know, was always concerned about being perceived as anti-business by changing that model,” he said. “As a contractor said, the fee gets passed along to the homeowner, it’s not business impacting to the local small-business guys. Yes, it’s going to get passed along to the homeowners, but it is not business unfriendly as it relates to the contractors.”
Selectman Sandy Ruoff said under the proposal, the building permit fees will go up, but not by an unreasonable amount and no more than a resident would pay in any other town on the shoreline.
“We will probably be voting on a fee increase,” she said. “This is after studying fees at surrounding towns and we, Guilford, are at the very low end while giving the same service or perhaps better service in some cases. We are not jumping the fees from $10 to $1,000, but we are going to raise them to make them more in line with the fees that surrounding towns are charging.”
A formal presentation of the new building permit fee schedule is expected in the coming weeks. Check the town website for BOS meeting agendas.