THE ISSUE: Impact fees.
 
By the Chronicle editorial board

Commission can come to aid of small business

Taxes keep rising. The price of insurance has shot up. Gasoline is costing motorists an arm and a leg. Impact fees have a stranglehold on the construction industry and small-businesspeople looking to set up shop.

What can Citrus County commissioners do?

Listen very, very closely to their constituents.

The present state of the economy has created stresses that can only fully be related to if experienced. Ask a construction worker who's going into the holiday season without employment how he or she is feeling.

What can be done?

Our county commissioners can do little about big, nationwide issues.

While the burden posed by Citrus County's impact fees may be a modest slice of the overall economic hardship, that's where commissioners can -- and should -- make a difference.

Commissioners need to accept the outcry from those frustrated by impact fees and make changes to help our local economy and those striving to make a living here.

Charging $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 in impact fees and higher for people renovating existing buildings to bring in new, small businesses only serves to discourage entrepreneurship and undercut the ability of contractors to make a living in a time when new home construction is slow.

Not all impact fees are bad and those national and international chain stores and restaurants have the wherewithal to fork over tens of thousands of dollars. The average Joe looking to convert a closed-up service station into a pizza joint, however, just can't do that.

A stiff fee for moving into an existing building is the most obvious flaw in our impact fees, yet there are other areas where the fees need to be assessed and lowered.

While commissioners have a challenging job in striking a budgetary balance between funding infrastructure and government operations with minimizing the burden on taxpayers, they need to take a collective deep breath, step back and assess how -- not if -- impact fees can be made more fair.

While that won't counterbalance the cost of taxes, insurance and gasoline, it could be enough to put some very squeezed Citrus Countians to work.