At recent candidate forums in Harford County, voters have been struggling to understand terms such as "impact fees" and "building excise taxes" and ways to manage growth in the fast-developing county.

The terms are complex and the need for understanding them is real. The number of households in Harford grew by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to the Baltimore Metropolitan Council. And those new households are putting pressure on county services: Many county schools are above 100 percent capacity.

The question is how to pay for new sewers, roads, water lines and classrooms. It is a question the county has wrestled with since the start of the unparalleled growth of the 1990s.

County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann, who served from 1990 to 1998, sought to impose impact fees, but the legislative delegation -- including County Executive James M. Harkins -- said no.

Harkins sought an excise tax after he became executive, but was also turned down because the delegation feared the County Council would not support the levy.

Residential units

According to the county's Planning and Zoning Department, nearly 19,000 residential units remain to be developed inside the county's designated growth area, along Routes 24, 924 and 40. That doesn't include areas outside the growth area, where one Maryland environmental group estimates a quarter of development will occur during the next 20 years.

"Almost 17,000 acres of Harford County's open space will be lost unless we change development trends," said Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Maryland, who said the group used the county's growth projections to reach its conclusions.

Harford uses two taxes to offset development costs. A 1 percent real estate transfer tax, levied when a home is bought or sold, raises about $5 million to $6 million a year; half goes to school construction and the other half is marked for agricultural land preservation, said James Jewell, county treasurer.

A recordation tax on new mortgages and other financial transactions of $6.60 per $1,000 is split three ways -- school construction, purchase of open space and water and sewer debt service, Jewell said. The tax raises about $6 million to $7 million a year, two-thirds of which is used for school construction, he said.

But the county has no impact fee or building excise tax. Impact fees have been hotly debated this election season as a means to ensure that developers help pay for new infrastructure. The fee and the tax are collected when a new building permit is issued.

Proponents of the fee say it would raise money for infrastructure in developing areas. Opponents say as the rate of growth slows, the fees produce less revenue, which cannot be used outside the area where the fees are collected.

The General Assembly would have to pass legislation to allow either type of levy; the County Council would also have to approve it.

Twelve Maryland counties, including Anne Arundel, Carroll, Howard and Frederick, use impact fees or excise taxes to help offset development costs, according to the Maryland Department of Planning.

An impact fee is a flat dollar amount per residential unit, while a building excise tax is based on square footage. Impact fees may be used only for capital costs, such as school or road construction, where the development occurs; building excise taxes are not limited to a geographic area and may be more broadly applied to such things as preserving open space.

Other counties' fees

Anne Arundel uses two impact fees -- one for school construction, the other to build roads, said James J. Cannelli of the planning department. The school fee is $3,161 and the transportation fee is $804 per dwelling. Since 1993, he said, the fees have raised between $2.3 million and $3.9 million a year for roads and $5.1 million to $6.5 million a year for schools.

In Frederick County, an area hit hard by drought this year and where building permits have been granted without regard to water supplies, officials have adopted a $5,100 impact fee per single-family home.

While an impact fee or building excise tax could help offset infrastructure costs in the short term, said Schmidt-Perkins, neither will be a "silver bullet."

Harford is in the same boat with other metropolitan counties, which at one time looked at residential growth as a revenue source, she said. "But for every dollar raised from development, you end up spending more in schools, police, water and sewer -- all the infrastructure needs," she said.

Harford County will begin to review land use and zoning next year as part of its comprehensive planning. Without good land-use policies and zoning, Schmidt-Perkins said, no fee can counter sprawl.

"There is simply no substitution for better planning," she said.