BY ALEX CANTATORE
Staff Reporter
Baseball and soccer players, builders, and local businesses alike will be hit by increased costs in dealing with the City, as the Turlock City Council unanimously adopted an updated schedule of fees for City services last week. As a result of the move, many recreation and engineering costs will increase substantially.
“The resolution represents staff’s annual review of the fees that they charge and how they charge them,” said Marie Lorenzi, Senior Accountant with the City. “(The City is) also looking to see if there are things that we do now that aren’t in the fee schedule and adding those.”
The council has long held that specific City services should not be subsidized by general tax revenue and should instead be recovered through user fees. As the cost of doing business rises, especially in this rough budget year, fee increases are required to recover increased costs.
“Each department is charged with reviewing its section of the fee schedule and recommending changes, and those changes are presented in the updated resolutions,” said Lorenzi. “These fees are looked at with an eye on what it costs us to provide the services, what it costs us to maintain the park area or maintain the facilities that are being rented.”
Among the more drastic fee increases are massage employee permits, at an increase from $25 to $100, lot line adjustment fees, from $1,275 to $1,725, and prezoning fees, which increased between $1,480 and $1,880 depending on the size of the development.
Entirely new fees for 2008 include tent/canopy permit applications and inspection fees, at $30 and $100 respectively, mobile food vendor permits, at an initial cost $175 with a $30 annual renewal fee, and a shopping cart containment/retrieval plan review, at a cost of $120.
In the area of recreation, park rental fees increase between $5 and $10 in most cases for Turlock residents, while non-residents see a decrease by a similar amount to bring the costs exactly in line with one another, eliminating the resident discount.
While the council seemed generally accepting of the fee increases, with little discussion of the new cost-recovery measures before adoption, at least a few of the updated costs raised an eyebrow or two from some members on the council.
“My only concern for the future, as we look at that, is especially in the area of recreation,” said City Councilman Kurt Spycher. “For Pedretti Park and the Turlock Regional Sports Complex we have some new tournament fees we are enacting (…) and staff seems to think we can support those, but I want to make sure that we don’t price ourselves out of being competitive as these teams look to where they’re going to have these tournaments in the future.”
While field rental fees have been completely overhauled and simplified from last year’s scheme, the costs have not increased more than a few dollars in most cases. The one major change is the addition of a $52 fee for tournaments that charge a gate fee, leading some youth baseball tournaments to increase from $114 a field per day to $184 a field per day.
A new tournament rate has also been added to the Turlock Regional Sports Complex soccer fields, set at $340 per field for adults and $280 per field for youth.
According to the staff report, facility rental fees increased based on increasing costs of maintenance and operations. This includes the cost of utilities, supplies and equipment necessary to maintain facilities, staffing for facility maintenance, supervision during rental periods, and processing reservations.
Even with the fee increases, field usage costs are expected to recoup only 90 percent of the actual cost of field rental, based on 2006 projections.
Councilman Spycher expects to meet with City staff in the upcoming weeks to review the tournament fees charged by nearby municipalities to ensure that all of Turlock’s new fees are in line. The City does not want to see the economic impact generated by tournaments travel down Highway 99 to a neighboring community instead.
“The hotels, from what I understand, in those events are packed, and that obviously helps our (Transient Occupancy Tax) with people eating in our town and shopping in our town,” Spycher said. “We want to do whatever we can to make Turlock attractive to bring people in.”
To contact Alex Cantatore, e-mail acantatore@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2005.
Originally published in the Turlock Journal 7/30/2008.
Retrieved from the Turlock Journal Web site.