Do you have any feedback on the City's proposed user fee changes?

Why are user fees changing?

The City of San Luis Obispo has a policy to recover the cost of providing certain services by charging user fees, also known as service charges.  The City reviews and updates service charges on an ongoing basis to ensure that they keep pace with changes in the cost-of-living and changes in methods or levels of service delivery. State law generally provides that fees for services cannot exceed the reasonable actual costs for providing services. In implementing this provision, the City has adopted the goal of comprehensively analyzing service costs at least every five years, with interim adjustments annually based on changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The last comprehensive fee study was implemented in 2017, which did not include Building & Safety fees, these were last studied in 2011.

In San Luis Obispo, past fee studies involved multiple departments and identified the cost of providing services and comparing the result to the current fee amount to determine whether it is recovering the full cost of the service provided. Determination of the full cost of service focuses on labor and uses expenditure and organizational information with time-tracking data, time estimates, and workload information. A fee study also provides an opportunity to add new fees, remove outdated fees, or change fee structures. Like all jurisdictions, the City is impacted by cost increases and inflationary pressures on labor, materials and supplies, and needs to ensure that service fees are aligned with the cost of service and provide an opportunity for the City Council to re-align fee amounts with the adopted cost recovery policies.

In May 2023, the City contracted with MGT and initiated the process to review and update the City's user and regulatory fees: Building, Development Review Engineering, Fire, General Government (administrative services like business license processing), Parks and Recreation, Planning/Cannabis, Police, Public Works, and Utilities.