Recent potential residential developments in Aurora and Naperville have prompted District 204 to look at each city’s guidelines on generation tables and impact fees.
What Are Generation Tables?
In layman’s terms, a generation table calculates the number of students coming from a home based on the number of bedrooms. Impact fees can vary based on the type of building: for instance, a house will have a different impact than that of an apartment.
Indian Prairie School District officials say Naperville’s generation tables haven’t been updated in over a decade, causing its calculations to be off.
How Much Money is District 204 Potentially Losing?
“For instance, if we’re getting impact fees currently at around $200,000, but in reality that should be closer to $800,000 or a $1,000,000, we could potentially have been losing out of millions of dollars,” said School Board Member Mark Rising.
“Is that a fair statement?,” Rising asked.
“Yes that is a fair statement,” replied Chief School Business Official Jay Strang.
The city of Naperville recently approved a 285-unit apartment complex at CityGate Centre. Their tables suggest that would add about 22 students, with an associated impact fee of about $165,000. The district disagreed, saying the complex would generate nearly 113 students, with an impact fee of roughly $846,000.
School officials said current generation tables aren’t only hurting the district, but also families who are left making up the costs.
“If we had 1,000 kids come into the district and we had no impact fee, no property tax from that development it would drive down our spending per student. We would have to do even more with less,” said Strang.
The study will be important as over 80% of District 204’s revenue comes from local sources.
What Are They Doing About It?
IPSD has hired RSP and Associates to conduct the study, which will be performed throughout the fall and winter.
Naperville News 17’s Christian Canizal reports.
