“It already takes four or five months to get all the permits, and then they say, ‘Well, let’s bump up the fees,’” Swift said. “We always thought we were paying our share.”
A recent city-commissioned study found Newport Beach subsidizes hundreds of dollars per unit on fees for services like permits for commercial piers and annual inspections for people who live on their boats.
Swift’s company, Swift Slip Dock & Pier Builders, spent about $70,000 last year on permits alone, said Swift, who has been in the dock-building business for the past 26 years.
“Every time they raise these fees, we get a little less — now we have to pass the cost on to the homeowners,” Swift said.
The city spent about $21.8 million on a variety of tideland services like offering tours of tide pools in Corona del Mar, commercial pier permits and investigating incidents involving sea lions between 2006 and 2007, but the fund the city uses to pay for these services generated only about $8.1 million during the same period, according to the study.
Among other price hikes, the study suggests raising fees for offshore moorings in Newport Beach to $87 per lineal foot — a significant jump from the current $20 per lineal foot.
“In the case of a few services, fees are tiny or nonexistent in spite of their cost to the city,” according to the study.
The services end up being subsidized by the city’s general fund, the study found.
But the city also gets millions from Orange County in the form of property taxes on boats in Newport Harbor, said Mark Sites, the owner of Intracoastal Dredging and a member of the local Tidelands Users Group, which has been critical of the city-commissioned study.
