Do you still think, as you did in 2010, that developers should pay road impact fees for the increased road use caused by their developments? Or do you now think the rest of us should pay all the costs? Five years ago, county commissioners made the decision for us and decided to give developers a free ride (Herald, May 12, 2010). By doing so, the county lost a lot of money that would have been dedicated to roads – $2 million from the wealthy Three Springs developers alone, not to mention the money from all the other developers.
Now that the roads are in bad shape, the commissioners are probably going to let us vote on whether to increase our taxes to fix them. That’s nice of them to let us vote now, but why didn’t they let us vote five years ago on whether we wanted to let developers off the hook? The proposal that the commissioners shot down then was for developers to pay 60 percent of the net road cost, the same as the city of Durango.
So, for five years they haven’t paid anything for roads, thereby shifting all the costs to the rest of us. I’ll be glad to vote to increase my taxes to maintain our roads if I also get to vote on developers paying their fair share to maintain them.
Steve Doob
Durango
