Sussex County Council opposes implementing a voluntary school assessment (VSA) fee despite unanimous support from school districts.
State Sen. Russ Huxtable (D-Lewes) sponsored legislation signed in September, enabling Sussex County to implement a VSA to address the impact of residential development on school capacity.
A VSA requires developers to pay a fee per unit built to offset the costs needed to expand school districts to accommodate growth. The fee would not apply to 55-plus or low-income housing communities.
Council passed on considering a VSA last week with Councilmember Mark Schaffer raising concerns the fee mostly affects low and middle-income families.
“People that are trying to get into a $200,000 house to buy into the American Dream are going to be prohibited," Schaffer says.
"I will tell you, the way that this tax is structured, in the Cape Henlopen School District with the new school that was recently built, my on-the-back-of-the-napkin calculations is that this tax will be about $17,000-$18,000 per house. Now, if you're a young person, whether you're a professional or service worker, and you're trying to get into home ownership, I don't know where you're getting that kind of money," he adds.
Huxtable disagrees with Schaffer's sentiments, saying his fee estimates are higher than reported numbers, and low-cost housing in the area is dwindling.
“The impact fees that have been shared are lower than that, and in addition, it would be capped at 5%. But I don’t know where those $200,000 houses are at all being developed in the county – this is all on new construction. The median home price in Sussex County is about $500,000," Huxtable says.
Milford School District’s Chief Operating Officer Sara Hale also believes there are misconceptions in the council’s understanding of the fee.
"It was a little bit frustrating listening to the council meeting and just some of the 'back-of-the-napkin math. I would hope that maybe they would entertain meetings with us to be able to understand the impact," Hale says.
She says calculations of the VSA from the Department of Education were provided to the council, and Milford School District's would be around $9,000 per qualifying unit.
She was also disappointed with councilmembers referring the the VSA as a "tax," explaining that without implementing it, she believes taxpayers will only hurt more.
“It is not a tax. In theory, what is a tax, is when we go to a school district referendum to build new schools because we’ve had this exponential growth – then we are taxing our citizens."
Hale adds Sussex County is the only county in Delaware without a tool like this.
Milford School District is unique in that it crosses both Kent and Sussex County, and Hale says the district's three schools in Kent have benefited from the county's impact fee, explaining it helped offset debt service costs that they charged residents within the district. She hopes their Sussex schools will be able to reap the same benefits.
"We've talked collectively as a Sussex County group of school districts, and we're all still very much in support of it. I think that we'll continue to do whatever information gathering and providing we can do for the council to clarify what their questions are and to help them better understand what this is and the true impact... even if we have to do some sort of amendment to how it's implemented."
Huxtable says he’s also willing to work with the council to modify current code if needed, but says something needs to be done to help balance the county’s growth.
He says there are things that Sussex County can do within their own land use rules and regulations to figure out ways to promote coordination between residential developments and adequate school capacity.
"[The council] can't just turn a blind eye to it because it's clear all the districts in the county are saying, 'Hey, we have an issue, this is what other areas are using — we'd like a tool similar to it.' It doesn't have to be this tool, but it should be something," Huxtable says.
