Trim or delay road impact fees

Inter Lake editorial

The city of Kalispell may have gotten the message, and not a minute too soon - Traffic impact fees should not get the green light if it means development has to yield.

As we have written previously, there is a reasonable case to be made for impact fees,and in some cases they are being appropriately assessed already in Kalispell. Police, fire, water and sewer infrastructure are among those projects funded in part by fees on development, with the logic being that new growth will require new spending in those areas.

The same case can be made for real-estate development and increased use of roads - although projects like the Glacier Town Center already commit to spending millions in private funds on roads and other infrastructure, and many of the roads most impacted such as Reserve Drive don't get funded by the city at all.

But the main problem with road impact fees, as originally envisioned by the Kalispell City Council, is that they were just too high and particularly il

l-timed. Wolford Development, which has been working to build a shopping, commercial and residential area for nearly 10 years, would have had to spend anywhere from $2 million to $6 million in road fees. That's just too much for the privilege of bringing the Flathead Valley more jobs, more shopping and more growth.

Perhaps now that growth has turned to stagnation and recession, opponents of the Wolford mall will get a sense of how wrong they were to stymie this project. The valley counts on development to keep all of our jobs intact and all of our checkbook accounts healthy.

That's why the City Council needs to follow the advice of some of its members to either delay the impact fees altogether or scale them back greatly so that they will not impede development. Money spent by developers today will result in an instant stimulus for the local economy as a whole, and will also add tax revenues to city budgets for years to come.

Meanwhile, road impact fees that discourage development will not only result in lost income for the city; they will result in a much harder path of recovery out of the recession that confronts us all.