Orange County Register: Pressure on O.C. cities to drop solar fees

Let the sun shine: O.C. cities drop solar fees, but many are still high

by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer

The Orange County Register, September 18th, 2011, 8:24 pm

 Back in January, we told you that a business hankering to save the planet in San Clemente would have to pay nearly $14,000 for a permit to install solar panels — while businesses in Anaheim, Santa Ana, Mission Viejo and Laguna Beach paid zip, zero, zilch.
Businesses are the most prolific energy consumers — something the recent blackout may have underscored — and half of OC’s cities were strangling progress by charging exorbitant fees for solar installation permits, a Sierra Club study said.

It then launched  a campaign to put the heat on and get the cities to lower  fees. And what do you know? It worked. (More or less!)

• Five of the 17 highest-fee cities have lowered their fees significantly, the Sierra Club says. (Laguna Woods, for instance, slashed it from $9,119 to $1,575.)
• Seven others have lowered fees as well, but are still charging amounts that exceed “reasonable cost recovery levels.” (That would include San Clemente, where permits went from $13,818 to $5,720.)

A dozen cities actually still charge more than what the study’s authors have calculated to be the maximum “cost recovery limit” ($2,540 for our area).  They are in red on the chart to the right (i.e., Yorba Linda, Fullerton, Costa Mesa, Westminster, Seal Beach, Orange, San Clemente, Placentia, Aliso Viejo, Newport Beach, Tustin and Fountain Valley).

But the Sierra Club’s Kurt Newick is impressed nonetheless.

“We’ve gotten every single city down there to review their fees or adjust them,” said Newick, who is in Northern California. “Virtually all of them doing the right thing here, and it’s pretty impressive. I guess that you Southern Californians are not as conservative as we make you out to be.”

Just about all the cities still reviewing their fees will be adjusting them, Newick said.
The Sierra Club developed a free, public fee calculator spreadsheet to help folks figure out what reasonable cost recovery would be.

See the chart below to see which cities that have lowered fees, and by how much.

On this chart, # means “fee reduced”; * means “fee under review”: