DISTRICT HIKES DEVELOPER FEES RATES RAISED ON PROJECTIONS OF 4,000 MORE KIDS THROUGHOUT NEXT FIVE YEARS.

Byline: KAREN MAESHIRO Staff Writer

PALMDALE -- Projecting several thousand new homes will be built in the next five years, the Palmdale School District has hiked by more than 7 percent developer fees that help pay for portable classrooms and building new schools.

Levied to help accommodate the pupils whose families move into new housing tracts, the developer fees were raised to $3.08 per square foot of floor space, up from $2.86. That amounts to $8,386 for an average-size new house of 2,723 square feet.

``There's a large study that was published that justifies the rates. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down,'' Deputy Superintendent Lori Ordway-Peck said. ``Based on what's going on in the community, whether we are still building homes, the rates comes out by doing calculations.''

To accommodate the additional 4,000 children expected to enroll from new homes over the next five years, Palmdale must open three more elementary schools and one more intermediate school campus, the study said. Palmdale elementary and middle schools now hold more than 22,800 pupils.

District officials said a slowdown in home-building activity will lead to developer fee revenues dropping by more than half in the next year. In the previous 12 months, the district took in $500,000.

Commercial construction looks to be on the upswing, however, particularly office buildings around the planned hospital in west Palmdale, said Joyce Swift, facilities planning technician.

The district charges developer fees for commercial and industrial construction at 42 cents per square foot.

The Antelope Valley Union High School District in September also forecast that its collection of developer fees will drop by almost half from $18 million to $10 million this school year because of a slowdown in Antelope Valley home building.

Palmdale's fee study projected the district could see the construction of 5,621 additional residential units over the next five years, 5,139 of them single-family homes.

Those additional homes will bring an additional 3,988 elementary and intermediate school students, according to the study.

The higher fees were adopted by the board at its Nov. 21 meeting and will be in effect for a year. There was no comment from developers at the meeting.

The state has set $2.63 per square foot as the standard residential developer fee for financing school construction, but districts can charge higher fees if they meet certain conditions.

In the Los Angeles County portion of the Antelope Valley, the developer fee amount is split among the Antelope Valley Union High School District and the individual elementary school districts.

The Palmdale district is among six Antelope Valley school districts that are now charging higher so-called Level II fees.

Districts are allowed to charge higher developer fees if they can meet two of four requirements set by state law: being on a multitrack year-round calendar, recently passing a school construction bond measure, having debt in an amount equivalent to up to 30 percent of its bonding capacity, and having 20 percent of its classes in portable buildings.

The district currently has $76.5 million in outstanding debt from certificates of participation, special tax bonds and general obligation bonds. This debt represents nearly 94 percent of the bonding capacity of the district, the study said.

The district also has a total of 572 permanent classrooms and 463 relocatable classrooms, equating to having a 44.7 percent relocatable classroom usage rate, the study said.

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