LEBANON — The new year is off to a rocky start as impact fees are now impacting the city’s budget.
Early next year, Lebanon will have to pay back about $1 million in impact fees it collected from builders to help pay for the city’s telecommunications infrastructure.
In March 2002, Lebanon began charging builders $1,250 for each new home and $2,000 for each new commercial property.
The Home Builders Association of Greater Cincinnati and the HBA of Dayton and the Miami Valley filed a lawsuit two months later.
Lebanon stopped collecting
the fees in November 2004
after it lost the suit in the Warren County Court of Common Pleas.
Running the fiber-optic
lines through the yards of
new homes to connect resi-
dents to the city’s telecommu-
nications system was ruled
an unconstitutional taking of private property, the court ruled.
Lebanon appealed the case, first to the 12th District Court of Appeals in Middletown and then to the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
While no city services
will be cut, the paybacks will reduce cash reserves in the
fund the city uses to pay for police and other city workers from $2.5 million to $1.5 mill-ion, City Manager Pat Clements said.
The city’s fiscal policy calls
for the fund to hold about
$4.4 million in reserve —
enough to pay for city opera-
tions for six months.
Clements said the city
will have to look for ways to
contain costs to get the
amount of cash in the fund back up.
Lebanon will have to do an audit to determine how much was collected from each builder and how much interest is owed on the fees, said Mark Yurick, city attorney.
The additional $1 million in paybacks brings the city’s total debt for telecom to about $10.8 million.
Lebanon voters agreed to sell the telecommunications utility to Cincinnati Bell for $8.62 million in November. The sale recently cleared a regulatory hurdle and should be completed early next year.
