The Daily Inter Lake

City Council to weigh transportation impact fees at workshop

The Kalispell City Council will ponder transportation-impact fees tonight - likely focusing on their potential influences on new businesses.

In discussions so far, proposed business-related impact fees have sparked the only debate.

An impact fee is a one-time charge against a new house or building to offset the extra costs of the city providing the additional services to take care of it.

Kalispell has impact fees for water, sewer, drainage, and fire and police services. Its government also is thinking about adding a parks impact fee.

The council now is considering whether to add an impact fee to pay for extra roads and other transportation needs created by construction or annexation.

The proposed transportation impact fees are $691 for a house, $454 for each apartment, and $352 for each condominium and townhouse.

The proposed formulas for commercial buildings are much more complicated, based on the type of business plus either the number of rooms or square footages within the structures. The business-related road-impact fees will be significantly higher than the home-related fees, because businesses try to attract traffic to their locations.

Earlier this month, some low-income housing and commercial-development representatives contended that high road-impact fees could discourage businesses and low-income homes from locating within Kalispell.

If owners of business-related construction file the appropriate paperwork with Kalispell's government before the City Council adopting the road-impact fees, those fees will not apply to those projects. Consequently, current construction projects won't be affected.

The council will not take any action on impact fees today, because the discussion will occur in a workshop session after its regular 7 p.m. meeting.

At the regular meeting, the council is scheduled to:

-Vote on whether to award an $18.25 million contract to COP Construction LLC of Billings to greatly expand the Kalispell sewage-treatment plant by 2008.

By standard procedure, that potential contract is contingent on final approval by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

COP Construction's bid was the lowest of four bids, though it was also $2.657 million over the engineers' estimated cost of $15.593 million.

All four bids were close to one another. The city's contracted engineering firm, Morrison-Maierle, wrote that closeness indicated that the four bids are accurate and realistic in calculating costs.

There was no major single difference between the engineers' and bidders' estimates, Morrison-Maierle wrote. Instead, the bidders' cost estimates were just generally higher across all categories within the project, the firm wrote.

A city staff memo said the higher cost should not translate to higher sewer fees, noting that Kalispell has built up a reserve from it sewage-impact fees and other sources.

Kalispell currently can treat as many as 3.1 million gallons of sewage a day. Meanwhile, it is treating about 2.9 million gallons daily.

The upcoming expansion is supposed to give the Kalispell plant the capability to treat 6 million gallons of sewage a day.

-Vote on whether to give preliminary approval to Richard Erickson to create 18 lots on three acres within the Three Mile Subdivision.

-Vote on whether to give final approval to single-family-house zoning on 11 acres owned by Apex 1 on the north side of Three Mile Drive.