Managing our Growth
As Salem grows, the demand for infrastructure such as roads, water supply, and public safety services increases. If the growth is not managed properly, it can put a strain on existing infrastructure, leading to problems. Demand can quickly outstrip the capacity of public safety infrastructure, such as police, fire, and emergency medical services. This can lead to longer response times and reduced effectiveness in emergency situations. The only way to alleviate this stress is to expand capacity and that comes with a cost.
Many of you may not know that taxes are not paid on new buildings until they are occupied, but the need for police and fire response begins as soon as construction breaks ground. This leaves a year or more where the construction is costing the town money but we are not yet receiving the revenue to pay for those expenses. That makes it very costly for the town to authorize a lot of new construction all at once. Salem is in the middle of this right now, and we are not paying enough attention to this concern. We need to do a better job of financially forecasting the costs to the town for all this new construction and ensure that we are not hurting our taxpayers in the name of uncontrolled growth. Growth is good for a community but it must be managed to minimize the taxpayer burden.
One mechanism Salem has to help fund the expansion of services without putting the full burden of new development on existing citizens is to collect impact fees from developers to help offset the cost of new expenses related to growth. For example, we may need to hire additional police officers to respond to increase call volume, which means additional police vehicles and a larger police station. The impact fees help to offset the cost of this increased capacity. There are rules, however, that require the town to use these impact fees within a certain period of time, or else forefit them back to the property owner.
Because Salem has continued to not address our own building construction needs, many of these impact fees are being returned to the building owners instead of being used to address these growth-related needs. This needs to change. We need to use these funds for their intended purpose. We owe it to the taxpayers to use these funds wisely and appropriately, not to let the money sit for years unspent until we are contractually obligated to give it back. Our new police station and our west side fire station are prime opportunities to use these funds to get Salem the new buildings that we need while minimizing the cost to the taxpayer, but we need to act now. We cannot keep kicking the can down the road or we will lose out on even more of these funds, making these much-needed improvements even more costly in the long run.