“This, to me, is housekeeping,” he added. “If you’re going to have growth and development, you need to have proper planning and mitigation of the impacts of it.”

The fee is expected to generate about $16,000 for the remainder of this year, Mesbah said, and perhaps $50,000 in 2015. It must be used first to restore the commission’s depleted reserve fund, and then could be applied to offset operating dollars.

But funding the commission continues to be a sore spot for Dane County, especially with the added difficulty of state levy caps in recent years — perhaps calling into question the commission’s future, fee or no fee.

“I’m glad to see this little bit of momentum taken (with the new fee), but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not enough to address the challenges this organization faces,” Parisi said. “I personally think it should be blown up and we should start over from scratch.”

Dane County this year provided the commission with $748,200 — identical to its 2013 allocation, less than what it received in 2012, and insufficient for current needs, according to Mesbah. The agency’s $1.3 million request for 2015, to help correct what Mesbah said was years of under-funding, was rejected by the County Board, setting up an arbitrator’s decision for the second time since the commission was created in 2007.

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