History
Impact fees were first implemented in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1947. To finance a water treatment plant expansion, the Hinsdale Sanitary District president John A. McElwain implemented a "tap-in" fee of $50 per new residential sewer line. The sanitary district was sued by the Illinois Home Building Association, but the district prevailed. The case was appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court and that court ruled that impact fees are legal if used for capital expenditures, but not legal if used for operating expenses.
Impact fees became more widely accepted in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. First used to help fund capital recovery fees for water and sewer facilities, then in the 1970s, with the decline of available Federal and State grants for local governments, their use increased and expanded to non-utility uses including roads, parks, schools, and other public services. Finally, in the 1980s the impact fee became a universally used funding approach for services and started to include municipal facilities such as fire, police, and libraries. After court cases in states such as Florida and California approved their legal use, many other states enacted laws which approved the use of impact fees by local jurisdictions.
Impact fees have developed as an offspring of in lieu fees but have had a more significant impact on funding infrastructure. In some cases, the use of the impact fee has developed its own phrase of “growth should pay its own way”.
Read more about this topic: Impact Fee
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)