Officials rethink fee
Honeyfield, Armijo admit glossing over ordinance passed last year

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — A city councilor and a city employee want to take back an ordinance they say slipped past them both the first time.

Councilwoman Mary Ann Armijo and City Manager Eric Honeyfield said they didn't know exactly what they were endorsing when she voted for and he recommended a new ordinance a little more than one year ago that levied a new fee on certain property developers to pay for the maintenance of city parks and trails.

Now that they know, they're asking the council to reconsider.

Mayor Bob Rosebrough said he also missed the implications of the ordinance when the council unanimously passed it Dec. 14, 2004.

How did the new fee get past them? All three say it simply got lost among the many reforms to the city's land development standards that were on their agenda that night.

"It snuck past me," Honeyfield confessed.

Armijo said the language about the new fee was obscured by the technical jargon of the ordinance.

The new fee was in fact one of many changes to the city's land development standards the council passed that night. It was part of a thick packet of recommended changes designed in part to clear away some of the bureaucratic roadblocks for local developers that city staff had been laboring over for months. Instead of voting on each ordinance one at a time, as it usually does, the council decided to vote all the reforms up or down in a single roll call.

The fee itself isn't new to the city. Land owners have been paying it, for the right to subdivide their properties into multiple lots, for years. What the current council did was apply the fee to anyone who wanted to develop and build on a single lot as well.

Although it's been just over a year since the council approved the change, Honeyfield said his records indicated that, up until the end of 2005, the new fee had not been charged even once.

Armijo has heard otherwise. The eastside councilwoman said she's heard from both a land developer and a buyer who claimed they were charged the new fee, one of them to the tune of approximately $8,000.

But it's more than the practical implications of the fee Armijo has a problem with.

"I object to the fee itself and the way it was passed," she said.

Although Armijo dismissed the idea of any attempt to hide the new fee from the council, she believed someone should have done a better job of clarifying the ordinance before it went to a vote.

Rosebrough noted that the council approved the package of reforms only after a verbal reminder that it was free to change any ordinance later on if it raised concerns.

"I think this falls into the category of something that should be changed," he said.

Like Armijo and Honeyfield, the mayor said the fee ought to apply as it did in the past only to the larger development projects that typically come with subdivisions.

Besides helping to pay for the upkeep and development of the city's parks and trails, the fee, said Honeyfield, can help developers by enhancing the sort of surrounding recreational amenities that tend to raise property values. But it can also increase the price of doing business. And given the underdevelopment the city suffers from, he said, and the shortage of affordable housing, applying the fee to the development of individual lots far more common than subdivisions was too much.

"When you're going after individual lots, you're going too far," he said.

And given how unpredictable development can be, Honeyfield said, the expanded application of the fee was probably not meant to bring a huge financial windfall to the city. Rosebrough noted that most of the expansion to the city's park and trail system on the current administration's watch has been funded with state and federal dollars anyway.

To rescind the ordinance, staff first has to send it back to the city's Planning and Zoning Commission, which approved the expanded application of the fee in the first place before it went before the City Council in 2004. But just as the council approved that ordinance, only the council can take it back. Even if the Planning and Zoning Commission decides to uphold the reform, Honeyfield said he would encourage the council to rescind it.