You would have been disappointed if you had gone to Wednesday night's forum hoping the candidates for the board of commissioners would talk about Wake County's student assignment fight.

As noted in today's article by Thomas Goldsmith, the Wake Schools Community Alliance stayed clear of student assignment questions at the forum the group sponsored. While discussing other school issues, candidates from both political parties blamed the other for the economic woes facing the nation and county.

Some differences emerged with Democrats Jack Nichols and Steve Rao both saying the county will have to consider impact fees or other means to meet school construction and renovation demands that could easily run to $2 billion in the next 20 years.

School board candidate Rita Rakestraw is touting her endorsements and her support for an impact fee in her latest campaign mailers.

In this new mailer sent this week, the catch phrase is "it's time growth helps pay for itself." Rakestraw says she'll put the focus back on the classroom by easing the taxpayer pressure to keep pace with growth.

Rakestraw says one solution "would be impact fees on new growth that help defray costs of school construction allowing existing dollars to go towards inside the classroom."

Orange County commissioners have approved a plan to raise impact fees in each of the next four years.

 The fees are intended to raise money for schools needs and vary by home type and differ by school system. But some increases are dramatic. By 2012, a developer building a new single-family home in Carrboro or Chapel Hill will pay $11,423. That's up from $4,407 now.

In the county, the fee on a single-family home will increase from $3,000 now to $5,623 in four years.

Some builders say the impact fees, particularly in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, will act as a deterrent, and one commissioner, Pam Hemminger, wondered aloud Thursday night whether raising fees so much would actually reduce revenue if builders simply stopped doing business here.

"If we raise the rates and get zero income, that's not a good plan," she said.

Omar Zinn, a local builder, told commissioners Thursday night that home sales are down 30 percent or more and many of his colleagues in the business are hurting. 

"I know it's been seven years since we've had an increase," Zinn said. "But to have it at this time - to say it's a bad decision is an understatement." 

You can read the entire rundown of fee increases for all types of homes on pages 2 and 3 of the attached document. 

Documents:

Prior to laying out a budget proposal that was quickly approved by the City Council last night, Mayor Charles Meeker handed out copies of an MSNBC feature that merged all the "best places" rankings together to come up with the best places list to end all best places list. (Essentially, the author unscientifically combined the best lists from Forbes, Kiplinger, Money Magazine, Fortune and Relocate-America.com.) And guess who ended up on top? That's right. Raleigh, North Carolina.

Meeker used this press clipping to argue that such a ranking was in no small part due to the recent decisions made by the City Council to tear up Fayetteville Street, build the convention center and make other major investments in the city. According to Meeker, the city is at yet another crossroads now and needs to keep investing if it is to stay on top of the rankings. (Just think what Raleigh will be ranked after the new public safety center gets built!)

Meeker went on to make one of his more astute political moves in recent years. He took the money that will be raised from the recently enacted higher impact fees and put it towards paying down the city's debt. This enabled the council to reduce Russell Allen's proposed property tax increase from 5 cents to 4.18 cents. Granted, the decrease is less than a cent, but it allowed Meeker to make a connection between higher impact fees and lower property taxes. The move was sort of a local version of President Bill Clinton announcing that the budget surplus should be used to save social security.

A final note: The only two council members who voted against the budget were Philip Isley and Russ Stephenson. Bonus points to the person who can come with another vote when those two ideological soulmates represented the only opposition on an issue.