By Stephen Hobbs, The Sacramento Bee

When Eden Housing wanted to start building an apartment complex in Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood it would have been on the hook for about $700,000 in specific development-related fees. But the final bill was nowhere near that number.

In all, the fees were reduced by about $620,000 through automatic waivers and other savings, said Andrea Osgood, Eden Housing’s chief of real estate development.

The Donner Field apartments project was eligible for those reductions because it is an affordable housing development and is also specifically for seniors. Construction on the roughly $36 million project began in October. “It may seem small,” Osgood said, “but every penny really matters in the end.”