[heenables]

Originally Posted by Stu from NYC

I asked him this question and yesterday he sent me his response. Thought about posting it here and after some time decided there was nothing wrong with doing so.

I will keep my thoughts of this to myself for now but do welcome comments.

Dear Stu and Sheila

Thank you for your email. My platform is still to represent you fairly. I am more than happy to share what I am taking into consideration with regards to impact fees. First and foremost, my position has not changed. The 25.5 % increase put some of our taxpayers in distress, and I am working to try and help alleviate that. With regards to impact fees and the adjustments thereof, there are 71 line items regarding those fees. They include such people as newlyweds that would like to build a house, and industrial businesses that may or may not want to locate here and hire local workers if the fees are too high for them to do so. Generally speaking they cover residential, retail, medical, institutions, office, services, and industrial. So you can see there are a lot of people affected, both in the employer as well as the employee sides of the house. My greatest concern is to make sure we get the best possible outcome for the taxpayer, without hurting our taxpayers in this county that may be negatively affected by a too aggressive increase. I am working diligently to identify where in our 76 or so revenue streams available to us the best methodology to relief the pressure on our taxpayers. It may take me some time to do it, but my goal is to have it back where it was prior to the large increase. Please remember, impact fees are only one of those 76 streams, and yes…Covid-19 has taken a toll on some of those revenue streams as well. Thank you for your email and have a great day…Craig










Craig Estep
County Commissioner District 3

I think this is a great answer. Seems like most of you think you understand the complexities of what needs to be done. It looks to me like Craig is stating that he is figuring out how to do what they said through various avenues. Did you expect something to change overnight? The good part is that most people here can keep running their keyboard mouths while these 3 figure out how to do what they said.