Our North Natomas Finances Group is a coalition of community residents trying to get answers to the question “What the heck is happening to all our Natomas money?”. We residents pay high property taxes and assessments. Developers pay lots of fees. Where’s all that money going? Why is it so hard to get a police substation, our community centers, a second fire station, or the Regional Park built?
We’ve found out about the City’s “2008 Nexus Study” process, where they analyze and update the fee rates developers pay into the North Natomas Finance Plan (NNFP) that funds our public facilities. Then we discovered that all the facilities we’ve been asking about weren’t even close to being funded (except the library). That’s because no residents had been involved in this process in the past years, so most of the money was spent on roadways and interchange improvements. And the fees developers paid were too low to fund everything. Now City Staff is trying to reduce the number and size of roadway projects to reduce the shortfall. But instead of putting the savings back into the fund, it looks like the City might refund it back to developers in reduced fees, unless our little group can make enough noise to change that.
If you want answers to these questions too, or want to see facilities built, you can be a big help by even just being in the room with us at meetings to show your support. The city meetings on the fees are monthly (sometimes every 2 weeks) during the day on Wednesdays and the Nexus process is due to complete by end of May 2008. The more residents they see, the bigger influence we have. You can find out more by sending an email to [email protected]. or joining our yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/natomasparkplanningcommittee/
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