Proportionate-share environmental mitigation fees for green infrastructure

This chapter discusses the need to preserve and protect green infrastructure in the development context, and the economic and legal basis for attributing a portion of the cost of such protection to new development through environmental mitigation fees. Requiring new land development to bear a proportionate cost of providing the new or expanded infrastructure it will require, impact fees provide in part an answer to the dilemma faced by local governments when searching for sources of funding for capital expenditures. The chapter discusses how the impact fee has evolved over the years to help mitigate the effects of new development. It describes market-based regulatory schemes and how they have been used to combat environmental degradation. The chapter explains how the different programs and techniques can be combined to create an environmental impact mitigation fee that is based on a market-based approach so as to make it a profitable venture to protect the environment.