Impact fees may be trimmed down
One proposal would exempt some major retail projects
Proposed Kalispell road impact fees likely will be reduced.
And a proposition is before the Kalispell City Council that could exempt Wolford Development's Glacier Town Center mall, the Spring Prairie shopping complex and Hutton Ranch Plaza from paying any road impact fees.
That's what emerged out of a council workshop on Monday.
A majority of the council wants to trim proposed road impact fees for businesses, but council members have not settled on how to make such cuts.
One choice is to arbitrarily trim the proposed fees.
The other option is to reduce the number of street upgrades that would be funded by the fees. The city staff supports the second choice.
The council is expected to tackle that choice at another yet-to-be-scheduled workshop session.
Council members Bob Hafferman and Tim Kluesner appear ready to trim the proposed fees to 25 percent of the current proposal.
Council members Duane Larson and Wayne Saverud support cutting the number of road improvements that would be paid by the impact fees - believing the fees would be easier to defend in court if they are not an arbitrary percentage of what a city-hired in-depth study recommended.
Mayor Pam Kennedy and council member Hank Olson also want to reduce the fees, but did not voice a preference on how.
Council members Kari Gabriel and Randy Kenyon did not say Monday whether they want to trim the fees. Jim Atkinson was absent, but last week supported keeping the current fee proposal intact.
Hafferman also proposed that any project would be exempt from road impact fees if its preliminary plat has been approved between July 1, 2004, and July 1, 2009. He argued that projects in this time frame had already made major investments in getting preliminary plats approved -and the impact fees would be an unfair last-minute wrinkle to throw at them.
Kluesner supports that idea. The others did not take firm stances on that proposal, although a few voiced support for some type of phased-in approach, including possibly granting one-year tax breaks to developments.
The city's annual annexation report shows that preliminary plats were granted after July 1, 2004, to Glacier Town Center's main outdoor shopping complex, Hutton Ranch Plaza, Spring Prairie Center and 1,645 homes including northern Kalispell's Silverbrook Estates project.
Consequently, those projects would be exempt from impact fees if the council adopts Hafferman's proposal as it is currently worded.
Wolford Development wants the city to drop all plans to impose road impact fees. Hutton Ranch and Spring Prairie developers have said that some road impact fees are acceptable, but the current proposals are too high.
Proposed road impact fees range from $928 on a new single-family home to $6 million to $7 million for Glacier Town Center (at full buildout over the next 15 to 25 years).
On Monday, the council gave its staff several tasks to complete by the next workshop, including:
n Getting a legal opinion on whether the fees can be trimmed by an arbitrary percentage.
n Coming up with a trimmed-down list of road improvements to be paid with the fees.
n Finding out how Missoula and Bozeman apply road impact fees. These two are the only Montana cities with road impact fee systems similar to Kalispell's proposal.
n Coming up with a plan to use development extension agreements for roads created by developers.
These agreements commonly are used with utilities. With a water or sewer line, the developer agrees to build a major trunk line that future developments can hook up to. The original developer is then paid by the projects that are hooking up - recovering its original investment.
Hafferman wanted the city staff to explore using these types of agreements for development projects' roads, contending that is a fairly simple endeavor.
While the staff agreed to tackle that matter, City Public Works Director Jim Hansz said that task will be difficult because it is hard to nail down the origins of all the traffic that will use a new road.