There is a lesson here for Lakeside.
By: Patrick O’Heffernan
In 1976 I was sued for $7 million by a group of developers. I was an elected director of a 50,000-person water district in California which was facing a severe drought that threatened drinking water and fire protection water supplies for our residents. It was the fire protection issue that helped us solve the problem.
The district was sprouting new homes, but they demanded water. Our projections showed that continued growth would crash our system, so we activated the state law that allowed us to block development that threatened fire protection supplies. Developers sued us, individually and as a board. We won and halted new construction and the growth in water use. To prevent another crisis, we and the county enacted water conservation measures on existing and new developments which developers had to pay for. It worked, and the district population continued to grow with adequate water.
There is a lesson here for Lakeside.
Have you ever waited 40 minutes to get from downtown Chapala to downtown Ajijic and cursed the 24/7traffic? According to the 2020 Census, Chapala has grown 13% in the past decade, San Antonio Tlayacapan 33%, and Ajijic by almost 15% . All those new people drive, but the roads have not grown .
The same can be said for water, the electricity grid, law enforcement, courts, fire protection – little or no growth in them to meet population increase.
The infrastructure picture is not all bad; the region has added 3 new hospitals, the cyclopista, new internet companies, and SIMAPA is connecting a new well in Ajijic.But the improvements don’t match the population growth. Homes, condos, and apartments are going up all over Lakeside –e.g. a monster new development will soon open in San Antonio Tlayacapan, dumping dozens of cars onto the Carretera every day.
The answer is not to stop growth – that won’t happen and shouldn’t. The answer is to plan for it and build for it. A tool for this is the community infrastructure impact statement and impact fees. Every new development would be required to pay the municipality a permit fee to project its impact on the infrastructure. Based on the findings, the municipality imposes a fee that is paid into a fund to pay for infrastructure upgrades from street repair to more police, to new water pipes.
Developers will claim that this raises housing prices. It won’t; the market determines prices. What impact fees do is prevent developers from externalizing the costs of their community impact onto residents. Impact fees make developers pay their real costs – which will reduce their profits – but it can also incentivize them to reduce their impacts with things like low water use fixtures and gardens, condo-based shuttle buses, and power-shaving lights. The municipality can also use the impact reports to help project future growth and plan projects to accommodate and guide it.
We all pay for the impact of new development in time wasted in traffic, electricity outages, water shortages, and shock absorbers. It is time to plan instead of pay.
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