ARTICLE
Tualatin Valley Water District (TVWD) has updated its plan review and inspection fees to better recover its cost of services provided for those activities. The HBA attended an open house on September 26th to provide feedback on the cost increases and the importance of keeping permit fees low as a larger part of the overall impact to affordability that local governmental fees have had. The newly adopted fee schedules are based on hourly rates for each of its services, in contrast to other jurisdictions that charge rates based on a percentage of the value of the construction projects. TVWD does not currently recover the full cost of providing plan review services and does not currently collect any fees for inspection services. The fee increases were originally proposed to be in two stages November 1, 2018 and February 1, 2019. At the request of the Home Builders Association Government Affairs staff to allow for more time to account for the increased fees in project planning, they have pushed all of the fee updates to February 1st, 2019. All plans submitted before February 1, 2019 will be subject to the old fee rate. For the detailed resolution passed by the Tualatin Valley Water District, click the following link. Page 99 of the document is the staff report, and page 107 is the resolution: https://www.tvwd.org/media/203028/102418%20packet.pdf