Santa Rosa weighing ballot measures to boost affordable housing

Santa Rosa is preparing to survey residents to see what city services they might be willing to dig deeper to support, ahead of a possible ballot measure to raise millions for affordable housing projects.

The city already had been planning to do some polling next month to see how voters feel about several possible ballot measures.

Those include an extension of Measure P, the eight-year sales tax measure that runs out in 2018; a change to Measure O, the 20-year public safety sales tax that some argue needs to be tweaked to keep police and fire departments in balance; and modernizing the city’s utility users’ tax, an effort that failed in 2014.

Last week the City Council urged its staff to explore voters’ appetite for another possible initiative - a property tax measure that could raise $4 million a year to kick-start affordable housing projects in the city.

The idea was just one of several funding options outlined by city officials as part of a long-term strategy for boosting the construction of affordable housing in the city. But it was clearly one several council members embraced.

“We’ve got a communitywide problem here, and it’s going to take a communitywide solution,” Councilman Chris Coursey said Tuesday. “To me, that means everybody has to have some skin in the game.”

The council’s willingness to explore a ballot measure to boost affordable housing is a reflection of both the severity of the city’s housing shortage and the inability of the city to do much about it within its current budget.

Given that the budget no longer includes millions in redevelopment funds that traditionally had been directed to affordable housing, the city now is scrambling to identify other ways to fund - and strategies to encourage - the construction of affordable housing.

Consultant Walter Kieser, the city’s expert on the subject, told the council that Santa Rosa could add 2,000 affordable units over the next eight years if it really tried.

By that, he meant more than doubling the city’s expected $40 million investment in affordable housing and homeless services to $84 million through a variety of methods.

The city could increase the “in-lieu fees” it charges developers who don’t build affordable units in their projects, effectively making it more attractive for them to just build the housing, Kieser said.

A commercial linkage fee also could be charged to new businesses or employers to as a way to fund the construction of the homes needed to house those employees.

In addition, the city could dedicate some of the additional tax revenue it receives as Santa Rosa’s property tax base grows to affordable housing, he told the council.

But Kieser made it clear that officials have to be careful about increasing fees on the very businesses they are hoping will drive economic development and home construction in the city. He said a property tax measure could spread the burden more broadly.

“Candidly, we are not going to get this done without a broad base of funding,” he told the council.

Councilwoman Julie Combs agreed, noting that the Bay Area is creating 10 new jobs for every new unit of housing it builds.

“The math just doesn’t work,” she said.

Several members of the construction industry cautioned the city against increasing fees, which they say already are too high and will be passed onto future buyers, decreasing affordability.

“It’s a very difficult environment for privately held builders to gain financing these days,” said Keith Christopherson, who was once the county’s largest homebuilder before the recession and now runs a smaller homebuilding and renovation firm, Synergy Group.

But Combs said that’s precisely why a ballot measure makes sense.

“This is one of the ways that we spread the cost, so that they’re not entirely burdening the construction industry,” she said.

Details of the city’s polling questions and methods were not immediately clear. The city has hired two Oakland-based firms, the Lew Edwards Group and FM3, for the consulting and polling work, which is expected to cost at least $100,000.

Santa Rosa’s chief finiancial officer, Debbi Lauchner, said there are as many as six different issues the city wants to quiz voters about through polling.

In addition to measures O and P, the utility tax and the affordable housing measure, the city also wants to know how residents feel about a measure to fund road repair and another to update ?other infrastructure, she said.

The city will use the poll results to come up with a strategic plan to maintain and enhance revenues over the next three to five years, which could include several ballot measures, Lauchner said.

The city needs to work quickly in part because the Measure P quarter-cent sales tax runs out two years from now, and the city needs to know whether that funding will continue, she said.

“There is no way you can take $9 million out of the general fund without cutting staff,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.