Panel refines road impact fees for Kalispell

Proposals may return to council Sept. 15

A road impact fee proposal is almost ready to return to the Kalispell City Council.

An impact fee advisory committee is ready to resubmit the proposal to the council on Sept. 15 or soon afterwards if one loose end is tied up.

That loose end is that Spring Prairie Center developer Mark Goldberg and the committee want to know how a city-hired consultant - Randy Groff of Portland - calculated that Kalispell's predicted growth would create 142,031 extra vehicle trips daily by 2020.

These proposed road impact fees have been debated and studied for almost two years, with the council sending the matter back to the advisory committee last year.

An impact fee is a one-time charge on a new home or commercial building that is built in or annexed into Kalispell. Its purpose is to help the city pay the extra capital costs of serving that structure.

Kalispell already has police, fire, water, sewer and drainage impact fees in place.

The proposed road impact fees have become controversial because new business buildings would be assessed fees depending upon the amount of traffic they create. Consequently, projects expected to create lots of traffic - such as Glacier Town Center and its 600,000-square-foot shopping center - can expect to pay larger amounts.

A basic premise behind the proposed road-impact fees is that a building that creates a high traffic volume pays more than a building that produces little new traffic. That's why a commercial building - which wants to attract traffic - would pay more than a house. The impact fee on a new single-family home would be $729.

Major developers and the city staff believe that litigation is likely if the council passes the proposed package.

Goldberg, Phil Harris (developer of Hutton Ranch Plaza) and Wolford Development (developer of the proposed Glacier Town Center) contend that Kalispell's proposal and process are not following state law.

Those three developers are tackling a majority of Kalispell's commercial construction in the near future.

The city staff and advisory committee contend that the package and process are on solid legal ground.

Another developers' argument is that existing businesses will grow - accompanied by their own increases in traffic - and benefit from new commercial development, and that the new construction will bear an unfair share of the impact fees out of proportion to the extra new traffic.