Perhaps the biggest treat to our way of life in Franklin is development. More houses leads to more traffic, higher taxes due to more children in schools and less open space/wildlife habitat.

Traffic - In the past 10 years virtually every member of the township council has intimated that they will solve or at least curb traffic. We ask, "How will they do that?" You might think that more roads, wider roads or better roads are the solution. They are not. An irony of city planning is that those kinds of improvements only solve the problem in the short term. In the long term people will discover the better routes resulting in an actual increase in traffic. Thus the only way to control traffic growth is to control community population growth. The principle way to do that is to control housing development.

Schools - Franklin has 7500 children in its school system. We recently added a new high school at a cost of more than $56M (a one time cost). When we opened the new high school we did not close the old one so we effectively added a new school to the system along with 100 new employees. This increased the school budget by about 12% (a yearly cost). The school budget is $116M/year thus it costs about $15,000 a year per child. To be fair that is not the cost to add one additional child however when we consider large numbers a realistic cost is about $12,000/student (TUF estimate). With the average home assessed at $310,000 if they have even one child the $6,500 in property tax that the home owner pays does not approach the expense to the community.

Looking at it another way, when planning a development one generally assumes that each home will statistically add ½ student to the school system thus a new home barely pays the educational expenses but doesn't pay for any of the municipal, county, library, open space or fire department expenses. In short every time a house is built (with the exception of active senior communities) everyone's taxes go up.

Open Space / Wildlife Habitat - This issue speaks for itself. We at TUF tend to be tree huggers so we consider this an important issue, you may not. The loss of open space is virtually not replaceable for decades. But even if you do not share our view we believe that most who live in Franklin enjoy driving though countryside as opposed to driving by row after row of condos. Appropriate to this section is the environment. More homes means more auto emissions, fertilizer in the water supply, paint, insecticide, detergent, etc. Also more burden on our sewage systems, garbage disposal and water management. We've been blessed with a good water supply for the last two years but our growing communities are beginning to outstrip our water supply during times of drought.

What is the solution - To be realistic trying to stop development would be like trying to stop the tide, there however are two ways to slow it down. The best way to limit development is to buy up open space. Right now we pay 8 cents a year for every $100 of the assessed value of our property. Most of that money is used to buy up farm land and open space so that builders can't build on it. This has two effects; the first is that taxes don't increase for the reasons stated above and the second is that with less land available the value of your home will rise: not a benefit at tax time but a boon when you sell.

The second way to slow down development is to stop over-development. By over-development we mean re-zoning or granting variances to zoning that allow developers to build at densities which far exceed what was initially envisioned. In short, we have a master plan, stick to it. The master plan is a document that is revised every ten years or so to allow for a rational and organized growth of our community.

Lately it has become commonplace to have developers donate either land or money to the town in return for permission to build more houses on a tract of land than would normally be allowed. Typically a donation of about $300,000 will be traded for densities that will allow about 20 new homes. Do the math, 20 new homes is 10 new children to the schools which is $120,000/year in school costs alone. The developer will make up $1M more profit. This sounds like a good deal for the developer but a bad one for Franklin.

Two projects on the books will add about 900 homes to Franklin. Most of that could be prevented if the township council and zoning board simply said "NO".

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