Some buildings exempt from impact fees

Wal-Mart Supercenter, a Hilton Homewood Suites hotel and another proposed Hutton Ranch Plaza building won't have to pay road impact fees if they obtain building permits by Oct. 1.

A proposed Kohl's department store - which now has been canceled - also would have qualified for the Oct. 1 impact-fee exemption.

These and other exemptions from Kalispell's new road impact fees surfaced Monday when they were questioned by Mayre Flowers, director of Citizens For A Better Flathead.

Flowers questioned two city memos - from Planning Director Tom Jentz to his department's files on March 17 and from Interim City Manager Myrt Webb to the City Council on April 16 - that laid out the potential exemptions.

On March 9 the council passed 8-1 a road impact fees law that was watered down from the original proposal. The new law went into effect on April 1.

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.

On Monday, Jentz said that the city used six-month grace periods in the past to implement impact fees for fire and police protection plus drainage, water and sewer improvements.

Consequently, Jentz said, the city is using the same six-month grace periods with road impact fees so it treats each fee's implementation equally. Six months is the maximum time that can legally pass before a new application would have to be submitted.

This means that if a project already had entered paperwork to apply for a building permit by April 1, it had until Oct. 1 to receive the permit in time to be exempt from the new road impact fee law.

Forty-two projects - mostly houses, townhouses and small apartment complexes - had submitted the appropriate paperwork by April 1. No new projects can legally try to beat this deadline, Jentz said.

The memos listed six projects applying for building permits in 2009 prior to April 1, with the last submission Flathead County's consolidated 911 center on March 13. The other 36 applications were made prior to this year.

In 2008, Wal-Mart, the Hilton Homewood Suites Hotel and a retail shell building at Hutton Ranch Plaza began the application process - which means they have until Oct. 1 to fulfill their requirements and receive building permits.

Construction on the 176,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter is expected to begin this summer, a company official said last week.

Last November, representatives for the Wal-Mart and Kohl's projects said those ventures would not materialize if Kalispell adopted road impact fees.

A few weeks ago, Kohl's abandoned its planned store in Spring Prairie Center, citing a desire to tackle other markets, with some blame also put on road impact fees.

However, Jentz said the impact fees had no effect on Kohl's decision to withdraw since it began its building permit paperwork in June 2008. Wal-Mart began its paperwork to obtain a building permit last December.

For more on this story, read Wednesday's Daily Inter Lake.