The Seattle City Council recently adopted the 2018 budget, including legislation that implements SDCI fee changes in 2018 to cover wage increases that reflect our current cost of doing business.
On January 1, 2018, these service fees go into effect. As in past years, we are making inflationary adjustments to most fees. This year’s inflationary adjustment is 2.75 percent. As an example, our Base Hourly Fee will increase from $210 to $216. The Land Use Hourly Fee will increase from $315 to $324.
We are also implementing new fees for reviews of environmentally critical areas revegetation and hazardous tree removal. We will now charge the Land Use Hourly Fee for these types of reviews.
We have restructured our inspection and enforcement fee for temporary noise variances. The revised fee is based on the number nights that are permitted to have a noise variance. We calculate this fee by multiplying .25 of the SDCI hourly rate by half of the days that have a noise variance. For example, .25 of $216 is $54. One-half of a 14-day variance is 7 days. Multiply $54 by 7 to get the inspection fee of $378.
New Director’s Rules, the Building Valuation Data (BVD) table and other fee-related information will be available to you on our website by the end of January.