Politics & Government
City Prepares to Adopt New Solar Permit Fees
Unanimous vote directs city staff to draft ordinance revising fees for commercial solar installations.
Responding to a , the Sierra Madre City Council voted Tuesday to move toward adopting a new permit fee schedule for solar power installations on commercial buildings. That article cited a recent Sierra Club study that showed Sierra Madre's commercial solar installation permit fees to be .
While Tuesday's vote is a strong indication that the City Council will adopt the fee schedule suggested by the Sierra Club, the change will not be officially made until the Council passes an official ordinance.
The Council directed city staff to prepare that ordinance and a vote is expected as soon as next month.
The report showed that the permit fees charged by the city for rooftop photovoltaic systems on commercial buildings are particularly high, relative to the other 89 Southern California cities included in the survey.
Find out what's happening in Sierra Madrewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
In fact, at a cost of $37,349 per 131 kilowatt commercial system, Sierra Madre currently has the third highest fee of all the cities surveyed.
The city has maintained that the study is not particularly relevant to Sierra Madre, since the sample size system used for the survey is far larger than any that would likely be installed in the city.
But it’s the way those fees are calculated with which the Sierra Club report took issue.
Find out what's happening in Sierra Madrewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“The time needed for city staff to review and inspect a commercial PV project does not vary linearly by system size,” the report said.
"Basing fees on the value of the solar equipment inflates permit costs to unreasonably high levels, especially for larger, more expensive solar power projects. To recover costs, therefore, permit fees should be based on specific review times and billable hourly rates and not on PV project valuations.”
In , Planning Director Danny Castro said those commercial fees had not been studied or adjusted by the city because there had been no applications for commercial solar projects in the city.
However, Council Members agreed that lowering the fees might cause more applications to be submitted, and that there was otherwise little risk involved in making the change.