Levels vex Kalispell council

One Kalispell City Council member said current proposed road impact fees look fine.

Two said the proposed fees are too high. Possibly a third believes that as well.

The other five council members didn't say where they stood on the amounts proposed for road impact fees for new Kalispell buildings.

The council discussed the fees Tuesday at a workshop. Another fees workshop is scheduled at 7 p.m. Monday.

For people trying to read council members' minds on road impact fees, here are some indications:

n Mayor Pam Kennedy and council members Tim Kluesner and Bob Hafferman have problems - to various extents - with the traffic engineering and formulas used to calculate the fees. Council member Duane Larson voiced concern with one piece of the methodology.

n Kluesner and Hafferman said they believe the fees are too high. Hafferman said the fees could be reduced to 25 percent of the current proposal, with increases possible in later years. Although Kennedy did not specifically say the proposed fees are too high, she appeared to lean toward that position.

n Council member Jim Atkinson wants to keep the current proposed fees, saying that they are smaller than those in other major Montana cities, and those towns are not suffering backlashes from them.

Some council members suggested that developers be given credits - reductions in their road impact fees - if they do extra work such as putting in roundabouts and extra traffic signals. However, the council would have to create a credit-giving system from scratch.

The council did not resolve any impact-fee issues Tuesday that it wanted to tackle.

Unresolved issues include:

Should the proposed fees be reduced or kept intact? Does a majority of the council accept its consultant's traffic and fee figures as valid calculations? Should the fees be phased in or grandfathered in? Does a majority of the council believe the proposed fee system can be defended in court if a lawsuit is filed against it?

During a public-comment segment of the meeting, six people spoke in favor of the currently proposed impact fees.

They argued that the poor economy and cautious banks are more to blame for slowing commercial growth in northern Kalispell - including Glacier Town Center -than the impact fees.

"It's the market that's going to determine what comes here or not," John de Neeve of Kalispell said.

The six also criticized Glacier Town Center developer Chad Wolford's contention last week that the retail jobs from that Wolford Development project would average $25,000 to $30,000 a year, arguing that figure is inflated because current box store and mall retail jobs pay less.

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 would be $928. But high-traffic projects - such as Glacier Town Center and its planned centerpiece 550,000-square-foot outdoor shopping center - can expect to pay millions.

Last week, Chad Wolford of Wolford Development argued that the city should drop all plans to impose road impact fees. Hutton Ranch Plaza and Spring Prairie developers have said that some road impact fees are acceptable, but the current proposals are too high.

In addition to the shopping center, Glacier Town Center is supposed to have 1.025 million square feet of commercial space around the mall and 246,686 square feet of office space.

Kalispell attorney Ken Kalvig, representing Wolford, used the city's formulas to calculate that the core retail "lifestyle center" would pay $2.293 million in road impact fees. He also calculated the entire 1.822 million square feet of mall, commercial and office space would pay $6.835 million in road impact fees, plus another $476,732 for 632 single-family houses, apartments and townhouses.

The total $7.312 million in road impact fees would be spread across the likely 15 to 25 years it would take to build everything that Wolford Development has put on paper.

And that $7.312 million assumes that all of Wolford's $250 million to $500 million in construction actually would materialize as planned over the next two decades.

Wolford's first phase - the $80 million shopping center and $20 million in surrounding businesses - is on hold. Last week, Chad Wolford told the Daily Inter Lake: "There will be no work done at this time due of the uncertainty of the current environment, especially the unknown factor of impact fees."

Depending on which calculations are used, Wolford's project is expected to pay 50 to 60 percent of the $12 million in northern Kalispell road upgrades for which the fees are supposed to be used.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com