Conditional Use Permit Fees
City zoning ordinances generally prohibit all land uses that are not prescribed on a list of permitted or conditional uses for each particular zone. This means that for some uses, you must obtain a conditional land use permit from the city in order to use your property in the desired manner. This permit process may include the filing of documents, hearings before the planning commission or council, and compliance with a number of conditions placed upon you by the city before undertaking the desired use. This process places property rights secondary to city regulations and city efforts at central planning.
Nearly every city requires a permit and charges a fee associated with these conditional uses. The process and permit fees vary from city to city and by type of permit or use sought. For our study, we assumed that the permit was sought for a residential property and we listed the lowest fee for a basic residential conditional use permit that was not merely associated with a home occupation (home occupations are often regulated separately under business licenses). We included hearing or other fees in the total if those fees are required prior to approval of all permits. In many cases the hearing fees and public notice fees are only charged when applicable. For those cases we omitted them from the total.
The fee data was gathered from city fee schedules and through inquiries to the city. We normalized the fees for each city using a statistical z-score and inverted the values to give higher scores to those cities with lower fees and lower scores to those cities with higher fees.
To see a specific city's laws for this metric, click on its name in the right column, then find the row in the table below the Private Property category.