Corona City Council, School District Agree on Range of Developer Fees

CORONA —  A two-year battle between the Corona-Norco Unified School District and the city apparently ended this week when both sides agreed to a schedule of fees to finance school construction.

Members of the Board of Education and the City Council announced an agreement Thursday to set a range of fees, averaging about $3,207 per home, that they will charge residential developers.

The agreement will clear the way for the school district to withdraw more than 40 lawsuits it has filed against the city and developers, said board President Sally Hoover.

Relations between the city and school board hit a low last year when the board filed a conflict-of-interest complaint against then-Mayor William Miller stemming from a pair of votes on the school fees.

After investigation by both the Riverside County district attorney and the state Fair Political Practices Commission, the complaint was dropped.

In resolving the fee dispute this week, both sides “were willing not to fight for the City Council, not to fight for the school board, but to look to the future of the cities, of this area,” said Louis VanderMolen, a school board member.

Depends on Density

The new fees will range from $960 to $4,515 per unit, depending on the density of housing development. An earlier school board proposal for the city to set fees ranging from $2,079 to $5,389 per unit, based on square footage, was rejected by the City Council last March.

Instead, the council raised Corona’s flat fee by almost a third, to $2,610 per unit.

The school district claimed that fee was too low to reflect the projected growth of its student population, the escalating costs of construction and the urgency with which new schools will be needed once the houses start springing up.

The Board of Education approved the new schedule in closed session Tuesday and the City Council accepted it in closed session Wednesday.

Listing of Fees

The new fees will be $3,295 for each town house (with densities between eight and 20 units per acre), $3,972 for single-family homes (between two and eight per acre), and $4,515 for “estate” homes (less than two per acre).

Apartments with two or more bedrooms will be subject to a $3,295 fee; studios and one-bedroom units a $960 fee.

The figures stem from a new set of estimates of additional students each new dwelling will bring into the schools. Those numbers help in projecting how many schools to build and deciding who should pay for them.

For now, the city and the schools are basing their fees on the assumption that each new small apartment adds 0.15 students to the rolls, each large apartment or townhouse 0.50 students, each single-family home 0.70 students, and each “estate” home 0.60 students.

A review of the fees in six months, then annually, will include a comparison of those projections and actual growth.