The Fayetteville

City Council voted Monday night to table the issue of jail impact fees

until its Oct. 16 meeting.

With two council

members absent from the meeting and others wanting some time to consider

new figures submitted within the past few days, a slight delay was determined

to be in order, since the County Commission will next be acting on this

matter at an Oct. 26 meeting.

The city is

considering, as all of the county's municipalities are, an ordinance to

collect fees for a proposed new county jail facility. Impact fees are

charged to developers to help cover the costs of new county facilities

and services made necessary by growth.

A pair of public

hearings have recently been conducted to consider amendments in the capital

improvements element that must be approved by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

Dennis Davenport,

one of the county's attorneys, gave a rundown Monday night of the various

residential and nonresidential fees and how they break down according

to size.

The category

that concerned council members in previous fee structures was that of

retail trade, which had been divided into only two categories, leaving

small businesses owners in what they thought was a financially disadvantaged

position.

A revised setup

has a new category for retail establishments under 10,000 square feet.

Jail-use equivalency factors also were reworked, with a factor of 1 for

the under-10,000 category, a factor of 2 for 10,000-50,000 square feet,

and a factor of 3 for those larger than that.

Davenport told

the council that using the number of employees at each business when figuring

the fee would be an iffy proposition, since business owners would know

this and adjust their staffs accordingly. For the basic components of

the new proposed fee structure, an average of 15 employees is used.

Under this

system, actual impact fees can range from $4,744 for a small retail center

to $14,232 for one of the largest establishments.

Using an average

of 2.75 people per residential unit, the proposed residential impact fee

is $869.

Impact fee

costs for the facility are being determined by combining two components

capital improvement and interest. The capital improvement component recognizes

the cost of construction of the facility, while the interest component

recognizes the funding mechanism used to pay for the construction, according

to documents supplied by Davenport.