Months of work have led the Town of Culver prepared to adopt a new model for permit fees used in building construction.
The Town Council will not consider the changes until their first meeting in November. Town Manager Jonathan Leist, however, says it leaves plenty of residential remodels and additions alone.
“This model, you use the square footage, but you also, depending on the category of the building, multiply it by a square footage value that’s issued every six months by the International Code Council,” says Leist.
The Culver Plan Commission adopted a new permit fee schedule on October 20th.
While researching, Culver found their permit fees were relatively low compared with neighboring communities. That, combined with added pressure to compensate Marshall County for the use of their building inspectors, is leading to the eventual changes.
The changes puts Culver more inline with Northwest Indiana. Leist says changes in the ICC are written into the ordinance.
“As soon as that’s released by the International Code Council, we adopt that,” says Leist. “They update it every six months, it looks like February and the end of August. So we started out with the February numbers and now the August numbers have come out.”
Marshall County will begin assessing a fee to the Town of Culver starting on January 1st of 2016.
New construction will likely see the biggest impact under the new permit fee schedule.
The Culver Town Council will consider the proposed permit fee multiplier at their November 10th meeting.
