Council to talk road impact fees

The Daily Inter Lake

The Kalispell City Council will chew over tonight whether to adopt a controversial road impact fee proposal.

Today's 7 p.m. meeting is a workshop session at which no votes are legally allowed. But the city staff is recommending a Jan. 20 vote on the plan, which is opposed by several development and business interests.

The City Council's impact fee advisory committee is divided 2-2 over whether the council should adopt the proposal.

Committee members Jerry Reckin and Jim Cossitt support adopting the proposal. Committee chairwoman Myrna Terry and committee member Mark Owens want more discussions. Committee member Justin Sliter was absent from last week's split committee vote.

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.

The proposed road impact fees are controversial because new buildings would be assessed fees depending upon the amount of traffic they are expected to create.

The impact fee on a new single-family home, which has minimal impact, would be $928. But business projects likely to create lots of traffic - such as Glacier Town Center and its planned 577,000-square-foot shopping center - can expect to pay larger amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.