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:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)