It now costs more to rent a sports field or a covered picnic area at one of Turlock’s many parks, as well as file for conditional use permits, zoning variances or change a street name in the City of Turlock, following the City Council’s adoption of fee increases for a number of City services.
The Turlock City Council voted unanimously at their Aug. 8 meeting to update cost recovery percentages and schedule of fees and charges for City services in the Municipal Services, Parks and Recreation, Planning and Police departments.
Many of the fee increases are tied to the City changing the way it calculates the cost of staff time. The City went from using a Fully Burdened Hourly Rate to compensate the time staff members spent on working on projects to a Productive Hourly Rate. The new Productive Hourly Rate is defined as a City employee’s hourly work rate based on 1,752 productive hours in a single year and includes base salary, fringe benefits, department specific overhead and City-wide overhead.
Those wishing to build in Turlock will have to pay a little more as Planning permit fees increased by approximately 10 percent overall. A $63 fee was added to the projects routed to the Parks, Recreation and Public Facilities Department to compensate for the staff time spent on the project. An Out-of-Boundary Service Agreement fee of $2,000 was also added to recover the cost of staff time spent on preparing agreements for water and sewer connections to properties outside the City limit.
The fee increases in Parks, Recreation and Public Facilities vary and are mainly due to minimum wage increases and the rising cost of supplies for the many programs offered by the City. Residents wanting to rent one of the picnic facilities at Donnelly, Crane, Pedretti or Broadway park will have to pay $1 more, while the cost of using the sports fields at Pedretti increased from $140 per field per day to $150 for youth tournaments without a gate fee and from $190 to $200 for those with a gate fee.
Parents with children in the PLAY (Positive Leisure Activities for Youth) after school program are now paying $1 more a week per child and while the fees for youth to get into the City’s public pool didn’t change, adults will now have to pay $3 instead of $2.
For Municipal Services, the fee increases are tied to the costs of materials and the need for two Utility Maintenance Workers to perform projects related to water mains, taps, tie-ins and backflow devices.
The deposit amount was increased from $800 to $2,000 on fire hydrant meters for construction-related projects due to the requirement by the State Division of Drinking Water for the installation of backflow devices in order to ensure the safety of the City’s water supply.
All of the Police Department’s fee increases were related to the change in staff time calculation.
The fee increases were implemented immediately following the Council’s action.
