The Seattle City Council recently adopted the 2019-2020 budget, including legislation that implements SDCI fee changes in 2019 to cover wage increases that reflect our current cost of doing business.
On January 1, 2019, these service fees go into effect. As in past years, we are making inflationary adjustments to most fees. This year’s inflationary adjustment is 3.0 percent. As an example, our Base Hourly fee will increase from $216 to $222.
In addition to our standard inflationary adjustment, SDCI will be making further adjustments to building permit fees, and the land use hourly rate.
Starting in 2019, SDCI will begin to adjust the minimum fee in the D-1 table by inflation- for 2019 this will increase from $210 to $216. Additionally, we are adjusting the D-1 table’s marginal rates for projects with values over $1 million. Finally, by Director’s Rule, we will adjust the Building Valuation Data (BVD) table to more accurately reflect the costs of building in Seattle.
SDCI has been catching up the Land Use Hourly rate to inflation since 2016, after not adjusting this rate from 2000-2015. For 2019, City Council proposed completing this catch up, and the Land Use Hourly rate will increase from $324 to $386.
Electrical permit fees will not see any fee increases for 2019, as the current rates are sufficient for covering current costs.
A number of changes will go into effect for the Rental Registration Inspection Ordinance (RRIO), including shortening the time between registrations from 5-years to 2-years and moving towards a registration fee that better reflects the program costs of managing single-unit and multi-unit properties. Under this proposal, 21,000 single-family rental homes of the 30,000 total properties currently registered will not incur registration fee increases.
The SDCI fee ordinance also includes a revision to DON’s historic review fees, increasing the maximum Certificate of Approval fee from $4,000 to $20,000 for new construction projects as these typically require more staff time due to their complexity.
New Director’s Rules, the BVD table and other fee-related information will be available on our website by the end of January.