DISTRICT TO LOWER FEES FOR BUILDER OFFICIALS ADMIT APPRAISAL ERROR.

Byline: Bhavna Mistry Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA - The Hart school district will reduce the developer fees it is charging The Newhall Land and Farming Company because an appraisal error resulted in a bloated estimate.

The charge per house to the developer will be reduced by $1,500 per home, a change that affects agreements negotiated since January on seven projects.

``The adjustment factors that were used in January were not the actual factors that should have been used,'' said Bob Lee, superintendent of the William S. Hart Union High School District. ``When we went back and re-evaluated it we found that the numbers were too high.''

In determining developer fees for those projects, the district uses a formula incorporating three elements: how many students the project will generate, costs of construction index for Los Angeles and land value within the district.

This year, when calculating the land value, the district's appraiser valued the land at $700,000 an acre.

``That's the info we had from our appraiser,'' Lee said. ``But when the appraiser re-evaluated it, the costs went down.''

Lee said the district could have faced legal action from Newhall Land if the change hadn't been made. State law requires developers to pay set fees to help finance school expansions needed to accommodate the residents their projects generate.

``It comes out of what could have been a lawsuit,'' Lee said. ``The numbers were not defensible.''

District officials said that the mitigation agreement contracts were signed but done so under protest and no money has since been exchanged.

``The first two years the numbers were adjusted without any appeal,'' Lee said. ``But this year they challenged it. It's our responsibility to pay that back to them.''

While district officials said that cutting developer fees could spark concern, it was necessary.

``I know it looks bad for us to write checks to developers,'' said Dennis King, president of the Hart School Board. ``And while we would like to say too bad we got it, that's not the way to do business.''

While school officials want more from developers to build schools, they are restricted by state law.

``The problem is that people think that we're not getting enough from the developers but we're getting all we can,'' King said.

The Hart district has recently joined with the city in an effort to overturn legislation that capped mitigation fees.

Impact fees set by the state through Senate Bill 50 in 1997 are too low and don't provide enough revenue to fix the problems cause by rapid growth, officials said.

The 1997 legislation also ended a city's ability to link its approval of residential projects with the developers' agreement to pay school district-mandated impact fees.

Daily News staff writer Heather MacDonald contributed to this story.