The Fort Ord Reuse Authority (FORA) is responsible for the oversight of the economic recovery from the closure and reuse of the former Fort Ord military base. FORA's efforts are guided by the Base Reuse Plan, first adopted in June 1997, and the 2017 FORA Fee Reallocation Study. These documents establish the circulation and roadway network related to FORA, identify the impacts from new development, and prompts the annual development of a Capital Improvement Program. FORA's Capital Improvement Program includes transportation improvements that are "on site" or within the former base, "off site" and "regional". The latter two categories include significant overlap with the projects in the Regional Development Impact Fee program. Attached is a table comparing the projects in FORA and TAMC's programs. The FORA zone is the only part of the county in which the TAMC impact fee does not currently apply, and the FORA fee revenues are allocated to projects by its Board of Directors, rather than the Transportation Agency Board.
With the planned sunset of FORA in June 2020, the FORA Board approved a Transition Plan and contracted with Regional Government Services to provide facilitation for how transportation improvements, along with several other issues, will be addressed Post-FORA. This process has involved reviewing the potential options for how the goals of the Base Reuse Plan can be fully implemented by other agencies and local jurisdictions after FORA. Currently, the Regional Development Impact Fee program is identified as a successor to addressing regional transportation mitigation for new development within the FORA area post-2020, with on site projects becoming the responsibility of the underlying local jurisdictions.
In addition to the development of a Transition Plan, FORA is also exploring the possibility of a short-term legislative extension of FORA. The intent of a legislative extension of FORA would be to maintain the Authority in a limited capacity to allow sufficient time to complete the transition of responsibilities, manage critical habitat, and retain the area's property tax increment funding. The bill (Senate Bill 189 - Monning) is currently working through the Senate committee review process and would extend FORA until June 30, 2022. If a legislative extension is not passed at the State-level, FORA's responsibilities will need to be passed on to other agencies by June 30, 2020.
In either case, FORA is moving forward with developing Transition Implementation Agreements to be entered into with the jurisdictions and agencies identified as potential successors. As such, the Transportation Agency will be coordinating with FORA on an agreement related to collection of development impact fees for regional transportation impacts. TAMC’s 2018 update to its Regional Development Impact Fee (RDIF) program added a FORA zone that provides a cost per trip fee calculation consistent with RDIF county-wide methodology used since its inception in 2008, so the mechanism to accomplish this transition has already been established.
Agency staff is now seeking feedback from the Committee on several issues to be used as negotiating principles when developing the Transition Implementation Agreement with FORA:
- Ensure the transition process is consistent with our established Regional Development Impact Fee program and procedures;
- Coordinate with local jurisdictions on transferring a share of impact fees collected from already-entitled projects to TAMC for regional mitigation; and
- Designate that a portion of any surplus FORA funding goes towards regional projects.