INTERACTIVE TOOLS Community Projector The Contributor The Populater Age Profiler Community Explorer Census Data File

Our newest community planning tool, The Contributor, calculates the levies or contributions needed to recover infrastructure costs in residential developments.

The Contributor is a further development of the Community Projector, which calculates population and dwelling projections. The Contributor builds on these projections to calculate development charges for dwellings of different sizes (bedrooms).

The Contributor is interactive. You set the building rates and enter your cost schedule. A menu lets you adjust parameters. The Contributor calculates contribution rates that would recover the costs over the planning period. If you set alternate rates, the Contributor calculates the alternate financial flows.

Methodology

The Contributor assumes levies are collected at time of building approvals, which means that they have to be proportional to some measurable feature of the building. Otherwise different levies for different types of sizes of buildings are impossible to determine impartially.

• This feature has to be a good indicator of the extra demand that the extra population will generate.
• This feature also has to be regularly counted so the extra stock can be accurately measured, and adjustments made to forecasts.

To cut a long story short, there is only one indicator that satisfies these requirements - the number of bedrooms.

• The number of bedrooms is a very good indicator of occupancy. Most dwellings have an occupancy around 0.8 persons per bedroom.
• Bedroom numbers are easy to measure and are counted every Census.

The Contributor makes projections of the number of bedrooms consistent with dwelling projections, and works out contributions is terms of levy per bedroom.

Because there are variations in bedroom occupancy rates (for example one-bed occupied dwellings have to have at least one person per bedroom), The Contributor allows you to alter the weighting given to dwellings of different size, and calculates the financial consequences.

The problems we address

The Contributor was developed because we became aware that the demographic calculations in many contribution plans contained errors or assumptions. The result was that it was difficult to independently replicate the calculations, which is the hallmark of transparency and accountability. In essence, everybody should be able to check that:

• the contributions levied, multiplied by the number of extra dwellings anticipated, raises the planned amount of money; and
• the number of extra dwellings will cause the additional population needing the infrastructure.

There are some common problems in contributions plans.

• The first difficulty is where the population projections and the dwelling projections are not reconciled. The missing factor is occupancy rates (persons per dwelling). When you are given occupancy rate projections, you can check, for any year, that this holds true:

Population = Dwellings X Occupancy rate

• The second difficulty is where there are different contribution rates for different types of dwellings, but no projections of the numbers and occupancy rates for each type. This means that you cannot check that the number of extra people from that mix of dwellings equals the total projected.
• The third problem is where plans use bedroom numbers as the basis for differentiating levies, but have no projections of how many of these dwellings there will be.
• The fourth common problem occurs where a contribution plan calculates the number of extra dwellings bringing population growth, works out a per-head development charge, and multiplies this per-head charge by the average occupancy rate of the dwellings. This can result in significant overcharging. I call this the Marginal Occupancy Rate problem.

The Contributor overcomes all these problems.

Specifications

The Contributor is an interactive Excel program that calculates development scenarios. It incorporates two other Tools, the Community Projector and the PopuLater.

You can enter and vary assumptions either directly into tables or through menu options.

When you are satisfied with the assumptions and projections, you just print the report, ready for distribution. The Contributor updates all text, tables and charts everytime you pick a new scenario.

Pricing

The Contributor costs $4,950 and comes with all the required data for your area loaded, and preliminary calibrations completed. You get full phone and email support in using it.

The Contributor is under final development. You can order now and be invoiced on delivery. Email us to keep in touch and be sent the Beta release.