Walker

The Mitigation Fee Act (Gov. Code, § 66000 et seq.; Act) authorizes a local agency to impose fees on specific development projects to defray the cost of new or additional public facilities that are needed to serve those developments. The Act establishes a variety of requirements to ensure local agencies timely use these fees to pay for public facilities that serve those very developments rather than divert the fees for general revenue purposes. For example, when establishing a development fee, a local agency must identify both how it will use the fee and the relationship between its use and the developments on which the fee is imposed. Moreover, the local agency must make new findings every five years to justify its continued retention of any fees it has collected but failed to use. If the agency does not make these five-year findings, the Act requires the agency to refund the unused fees to the current owners of the affected properties.

In 1989, defendant and appellant City of San Clemente (City) created the “Beach Parking Impact Fee” because the City anticipated that substantial residential development proposed for the City’s inland areas would significantly increase…