The City of Sealy discussed the possibility of adopting a master fee schedule for the city. The master fee schedule is in an effort to begin to collect a lot of fees that have been missed by the city as well as offset a lot of expenses that the city has been absorbing that should be passed on to developers as well as individuals that utilize city services. Before the creation/adoption of this master fee schedule, the city staff had to go and consult fee schedules associated with different services in the different departments of the city. With the creation of the master fee schedule, all fees will be easily available to all staff in all departments all the time.
The fees for residential and commercial are being kept separate in an effort to keep individual permits at a more affordable level for smaller home projects vs. the fees that large developments would pay. Event fees were an issue because some event holders were not being charged fees or enough in fees to offset the use of city property as well as the city staff that would have to come in before and after the event to clean, set up roadblocks, etc. These staff members are coming in above and beyond their normal work week and are being paid at time-and-a-half which is really becoming an issue to the city budget as more and more events are happening in the city.
The discussion was far too long to summarize well but, the entire discussion of the fee schedule can be viewed below in the video beginning at the 01:16:42 mark of the video to the 02:04:30 of the video below:
This was the first of two readings and will be brought back at the next council meeting for final adoption.
