Council workshop takes up impact fees

The Daily Inter Lake

Who knows what Kalispell City Council members think of a proposed road-impact fee?

In fact, council members themselves probably don't have a feel on what the council as a whole thinks.

That haziness should clear up at 7 p.m. Tuesday during a workshop session after a short regular meeting on routine matters. No votes are legally allowed in a workshop session.

The council originally scheduled a Tuesday public hearing on the matter, but canceled it because members thought the body is not near any major decisions on the topic.

Tonight's meeting is moved to Tuesday because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Tuesday will be when council members discuss what they like and don't like about the proposed impact fees.

Not an inkling of a consensus emerged from last week's council workshop session on the same subject - except that most council members had plenty of questions and wanted to spend a lot more time talking about the issue.

On Tuesday, the council is likely to discuss:

n Individual council members' concerns and objections.

n Whether to adopt the figures and formulas suggested in a longtime study by a city consultant.

n Whether the proposed fees should be trimmed.

n Whether the fees should be phased in, with grandfathering provided for projects that exist on paper but have not obtained building permits.

n Whether the proposed fee system meets the state's legal requirements.

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 for 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 - can expect to pay larger amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.