
From left, Shasta County supervisors Patrick Jones, Kevin Crye and Chris Kelstrom. Photos by Alan Ernesto Phillips.
In a move newly appointed Shasta County Board of Supervisors chair Kevin Crye claimed would “spur growth” and help the “little guy,” the MAGA board majority voted 3-2 to suspend new development impact fees in the unincorporated county during Tuesday’s supervisors meeting.
District Supervisor 1 Crye, District 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones and District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom voted for the measure.
District 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert and District 2 Supervisor Tim Garman voted against Crye’s proposal.
The elimination of impact fees for new developments in the unincorporated area will reduce county revenue by $930,000 per year according to figures provided at the meeting by Shasta County auditor/controller Nolda Short.
“The premise [of impact fees] is growth would pay its own way, it would allow the funding of infrastructure expansion to be passed on to new development instead of the existing rate and taxpayers,” Short said. “Without the establishment of impact fees, future capital costs that result from that increased demand based on growth will be paid for by the general fund or whatever revenue resources the board sees fit.”
Translation: Going forward, taxpayers will pay the infrastructure costs associated with new developments instead of developers.
Impact fees can only be spent on the expansion of public infrastructure, such as jails and police substations, public health facilities, libraries, sheriff patrol and investigation, general government facilities, animal control facilities, fire protection and traffic facilities.
The impact fees for new development were put in place in Shasta County in 2008 and have raised $8.2 million since then. So far $3.2 million has been spent on the juvenile rehabilitation facility, the south county fire station, the Sheriff Department’s south county station and the county’s emergency operations center.
The remaining $5 million is slotted for anticipated projects including much-needed county jail expansion, public health facilities and a mobile clinic, Animal Control emergency evacuation equipment and the Knighton Road bike pedestrian project.
It’s important to note impact fees don’t cover the entire costs of these projects. Shasta County’s total recommended budget for FY2023-2024 is $658,905,327. Just 11 percent of that amount, $73,439,601 is discretionary revenue, which includes nearly $1 million in impact fee revenue. Impact fees are a small but important slice of the county’s limited discretionary income.
Kevin Crye and the Cringe Factor
- Dist. 1 Supervisor/Chair Kevin Crye
- Dist. 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones
- Dist. 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom
Crye, Jones and Kelstrom all alleged, with homespun anecdotes and no supporting documentation, that growth in the form of increased sales and property taxes will make up for the nearly $1 million loss in annual revenue.
“In order to alleviate the burden of doing business in Shasta County and help boost our economy during these uncertain times, I propose to terminate Shasta County’s impact fees altogether,” Crye said. “Bottom line this is about helping the little guy and spurring economic growth.”
Crye claimed he’s been studying impact fees for six months, but like a procrastinating high school student, the District 1 Supervisor failed to turn in any homework demonstrating that cutting impact fees will do what he claims. Apparently, it’s just a feeling he has — a belief.
“I believe I’m banking the vote on it will be made up in sales and property tax and in growth to Shasta County also,” Crye proclaimed.
Crye raised a ruckus about the well-known phenomenon of long-term population forecasts being wildly inaccurate, since our knowledge of demographic human behavior remains imperfect. For example, in the study conducted for the city of Redding and Shasta County by Muni Financial in 2008 to establish a rate for impact fees, the county’s population was projected to grow from 176,000 people in 2008 to 270,000 people in 2030.
The county’s current population is 182,000, a 3.4 percent increase since 2008, so obviously the 2030 estimate of 270,000 people, a 53.4 percent increase, was dramatically high. Again, that’s not unusual for long-term population forecasts.
The estimate made 20 years ago was based on the rapid growth California experienced in the last half of the 20th century. Almost no one predicted the state’s population would crash like it has during the first two decades of the 21st century.
The 2030 population estimate is just one of many factors used to calculate impact fees, but Crye wants us to believe it’s the only factor. By doing so, Crye commits the fallacy of composition—mistaking the part for the whole—and insists that the entire impact fee program should be scrapped.
In a cringe-inducing moment, Crye questioned auditor/controller Short about the 270,000-population overestimate and the corresponding overestimate of $80 million in impact fees projected to be raised by 2030.
“I want to make sure people understand that’s $80 million they estimated we would have collected and we have $8 million,” Crye said to Short. “That’s not a small miss. That is gargantuan. In private industry you can’t miss the mark by 90 percent.”
For the record, Oakland-based Muni Financial is a private industrial concern. To repeat: long-term population forecasts are often wrong, and aren’t the only metric used for calculating Shasta County’s impact fees. The $8.2 million the county has raised in impact fee revenue since 2008 proportionally aligns with the county’s current 182,000-population.
That’s the difference between reality and forecasts Crye can’t seem to comprehend. Facing a recall election in March, the embattled supervisor has concocted a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. In fact, impact fees are a benefit if you want a larger jail, more sheriff substations, more fire stations and libraries and the like.
All of those are items Crye, Jones and Kelstrom claim to support. Their support for removing impact fees to help pay for them puts those claims to the test.
Historical Revisionism and Misogyny
District 4 Supervisor Jones has a habit of revising his history as a Redding City Council member and former mayor 20 years ago in the aughts. So, when he says he reduced impact fees in the city of Redding resulting in a miraculous economic boom, take it with a grain of salt.
“We proved all of this,” said the now former-chair Jones. “We’ve done it here in this county. We’ve reduced impact fees and had an immediate response. I mean immediate, tens of millions of dollars coming into the city of Redding when nothing was happening before.”
Jones did not reply to A News Café’s email seeking documentation of this alleged impact fee reduction and subsequent economic boom. Crye failed to respond to a similar set of questions about his current proposal.
Perhaps the most embarrassing thing about Los Tres Pendejos is their unbridled misogyny as directed at District 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert, who fiercely defended public infrastructure financed in part by impact fees in her own district as well as District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom’s.
“What we’re losing here is [this is] going to impact the quality of life in Shasta County,” Rickert said.

District 3 Supervisor Mary Rickert.
“I’m kind of shocked that this actually came forward. What about the people in Cottonwood? They want their south county substation to be funded and to continue to be funded. The patrol stations, the libraries, the people that support the libraries?”
Cottonwood is in Kelstrom’s district and his ears pricked up. A chance to attack Rickert, who’s running for reelection in the March primary, his own constituents be damned!
“Seeing as how you mentioned Cottonwood,” the usually silent rambling man began, and then launched into a baritone rant that was part auctioneer and part Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
“It was $20,000 cheaper to build on the south side in Tehama County,” Kelstrom recalled about the turn of the century. “I know people personally in Cottonwood who aren’t going to build because of the fees, because of the permit process and everything else.”
That pesky ‘everything else.’
“You’re not going to hire the local stucco guy and the local painter and the local framer and the local roofer and the local carpet layer and the local cement guy because you’re not going to build because the fees are so high,” Kelstrom rhythmically concluded.
What about the south county fire and patrol stations? The jail expansion project? The libraries? The animal rescue projects?
Not a word about public infrastructure from Kelstrom, who’s not up for reelection until 2026.
A Failure to Recuse and Welfare for the Rich
The fact that Crye hadn’t done his homework on impact fees was glaringly revealed during the meeting when Paul Hellman, director of the Shasta County Department of Resource Management, had to look up on a computer how much the county’s impact fees are, because Crye didn’t have a clue.
“Anywhere in the unincorporated area if you build a home there’s what’s called the main fees, $6297.16,” Hellman explained. “In addition, if you’re in the area served by the Shasta County Fire Department it’s another $1954.37.”
Hellman said that depending on the public infrastructure required for any given single-family home, the total impact fees range between $6300 and $10,000.
Supervisor Rickert argued that this amount spread out over a 30-year mortgage costs the homeowner an extra $50 to $60 dollars a month at the current interest rate. The total cost of today’s $370,000 median priced home is $708,946 at 7 percent interest for 30 years. The $10,000 impact fee is absorbed by this larger amount with minimal financial pain.
“I’m surprised that people aren’t looking at the big picture of these various issues Nolda brought forth that this is going to impact,” Rickert said. “It’s going to impact our general fund. It’s going to impact law enforcement, and we don’t have enough money now to sustain law enforcement.”
During public comment on eliminating the impact fee, several speakers noted that Jones stood to benefit because his gun range project on the Millville Plains is currently in the development queue.
“My first comment would be Supervisor Jones, if you don’t plan on doing it already, we would ask that you recuse yourself from this matter being that you have a project in the queue with resource management that would be subject to impact fees, and therefore there would be a financial gain should we reduce or do away with impact fees,” said Dawn Duckett, a frequent commentor who identifies as a Republican and a fiscal conservative.
Jones refused to recuse himself.
“The way that I see it, and many of my friends and neighbors that I’ve talked to about this see this,” Duckett continued, “the unintended consequences with the county would be giving a green light to big developers to come in and create urban sprawl while we pick up the cost of the impacts for that.”
“I’m shocked that this has been thrown out there without significant notice to the public,” said Jeff Gorder, a retired Shasta County defense attorney who’s helping lead the movement to recall Crye.
“This is a major issue. It reminds me of the Dominion Voting Systems, when that was just dismantled without any consideration of the consequences both financial and practical.”
Crye infamously called upon MyPillow CEO and election-denier Mike Lindell in person last year to defend Shasta County from potential lawsuits resulting from Crye, Jones and Kelstrom’s vote to break the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems. The move cost the county millions of dollars, all for totally unfounded claims of election fraud.
Gorder called attention to Jones’ failure to recuse himself from voting for the impact fee elimination.
“I do think we need to know how much Mr. Jones will benefit from this,” Gorder added. “I’d like the auditor or the building department to give us an estimate as to how much in a dollar amount Mr. Jones will benefit from the loss of these impact fees.”
After the meeting, Hellman told the Record Searchlight that Jones stood to have $20,000 in impact fees waived with passage of the ordinance.
“This is welfare for the rich,” longtime local realtor broker Brad Garbutt said at the meeting. “The people who develop projects are not poor people, they are rich people.”
After the meeting, A News Café asked Garbutt about Jones’ claim that reducing impact fees in Redding lead to a real estate boom in the aughts.
“There was a boom in the early 2000s when Patrick served on Redding City Council but it had zero to do with impact fees,” Garbutt said. “Lenders were loaning money to anyone who could fog a mirror and builders could not build homes fast enough to meet demand. Inventory was low, prices were skyrocketing. Then when the bubble burst [in 2008], many builders went bankrupt.”
Garbutt concurred with Rickert that Shasta County impact fees aren’t dissuading homebuyers because the cost is spread out over time, and only adds 1 percent to 2 percent to the price of a new home.
“As I said at the meeting, this is welfare for the rich and these savings in permit fees will not be passed along to the buyer,” Garbutt said. “The issues with building in the county that are stifling new construction are exorbitant cost of fire insurance, lack of sewer and water services.”
Curiously, homeowners insurance, which has grown increasingly expensive after blazes such as the Carr and Zogg Fires raged through Shasta County in recent years, never arose as a topic at Tuesday’s meeting.
“You’re basically shifting the burden from the developers to the taxpayer,” Garbutt said at the meeting. “The taxpayers are the ones who are going to foot the bill for all this growth and all of these various county departments are going to be deprived of income that they need.”
Local philanthropist Judy Salter pointed out that many of the flannel clad members of the building trades who spoke at the meeting in favor of the proposal were referring to building fees, which aren’t being eliminated.
“We’re not talking about building fees, we’re talking about impact fees,” Salter said. “And for me, and I’ve said this a million times before, the jail is hugely important to us, and one of the most important uses for impact fees is going to be for the jail.”
“Wildfire is a huge issue here, to cut away funding for these integral projects, for safety, both physical and property, just to me, makes absolutely no sense, and is indicative of not looking at the broader needs of this community,” Salter said. “We need more fire stations. We need to get the jail built. Impacts fees make a huge difference in that category.”
Joshua Brown, 20, the longtime local socialist activist who was elected to the Shasta Union Elementary School board last November, wasn’t fooled by Crye’s talk of looking out for the “little guy.”
“This doesn’t help the little guy, all tax and fee cuts for the wealthy do is transfer money from working class families to the top,” Brown said to the board. “You self-proclaimed populists claim to be fighting the elites. That’s the opposite of true. You are the elites.”
Chair Crye Flexes Authoritarian Muscle Head
Crye’s proposal to eliminate new impact fees in the unincorporated county caught many observers by surprise, and words such as stunned, shocked and flabbergasted were heard frequently from public speakers. Dawn Duckett questioned whether Crye was purposely trying to end his political career.
“Mr. Crye, I just am shocked and astounded to see this on the agenda,” Duckett said. “No one that I’ve talked to is in favor of doing away with these fees at this time. I have to question whether or not you are actually just trying to get recalled. That’s a question in my mind.”
Supervisors Rickert and Garman, who learned about Crye’s proposal last Friday, each proposed motions to study the proposal and bring it back to the board later for a vote. Garman’s line of questioning revealed Short hasn’t conducted a comparison of impact fees with similarly sized counties.
“I’m really flabbergasted,” Rickert said. “I truly believe that we need to have a more thorough study. I think we need to have better information. I think we need to compare ourselves to similar sized counties. I’m confused why did you bring this forward? Who’s pushing for this? I haven’t talked to anybody … “
Crye cut her off.
“Supervisor Rickert, I started my meeting by reading this, I could provide you a copy, I explained,” he snipped. Crye was referring to his opening remarks, in which he falsely assumed the population overestimate in the 2008 Muni Financial study somehow negates the entire impact fee structure. He’s saying that — not Short — who Crye used as a prop during the meeting, saying she provided “ironclad proof” of his cockeyed theory.
She didn’t.
“I have a question for you,” Garman asked Crye. “I want to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples and not apples to bananas. You’re talking about the growth, and basically from what I’m gathering you are saying we will grow faster and grow more if we get rid of these fees. Is that what you’re hinting at here?”
“The only way to see if we will grow is to reduce fees,” Crye said loftily.
One highlight of the meeting came late in the debate, when Jones’ attempt to blame Rickert, his bitter rival, for not abolishing the impact fee when she first joined the board in 2017, blew up in his face like a cartoon cigar.
“So, to say we need to study it and we need to look at it more is just lack of experience by certain supervisors that haven’t that they should have,” Jones snarled. “They should have been working on this from the day they got elected and I’m just sorry they got elected. And I’m sorry I didn’t do this last year. This is exactly what’s going to spur growth in Shasta County. We’ve already proved it.”
“Supervisor Jones, you’ve been on the board three years,” Rickert said. “There was nothing to stop you from bringing this forward. The fact of the matter is we did, and I was chair at the time, we did suspend the increase on impact fees. We did that in [2020 and] 2022, we have tried to curtail these.”
Which is true. But truth doesn’t matter to our MAGA board majority. As they’ve consistently demonstrated for two years, they’re not here to build Shasta County up. They’re here to tear the county down and recreate it in their own austere right-wing image.
Crye, Jones and Kelstrom’s cavalier decision to eliminate impact fees is just another signpost on the highway to hell we’re embarked upon.
“If you’re wondering why we’re not developing and why our population’s going down, it has nothing to do with impact fees,” said Garbutt, the longtime local real estate broker. “It has more to do with this desire to be the poorest state in the country by going with the State of Jefferson.”
“People that want to think of locating here, they don’t want to be part of the poorest state in the country,” he said.
It’s that simple. Jones is up for reelection and Crye is being recalled in the March primary. Vote like your county depends upon it. Because it does.
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