Impact-fee choices face City Council tonight

The Daily Inter Lake

The Kalispell City Council will decide tonight what it wants to do with a controversial road impact fee proposal.

Impact fees are the only topic on the agenda for the 7 p.m. special meeting.

The council has at least five options to consider, including:

- Adopting the fees as presented in a consultant's study.

- Exempting from the fees any projects that have had preliminary plats approved between July 1, 2004, and July 1, 2009, for six years after the approval date. Preliminary plats were granted after July 1, 2004, to Glacier Town Center's main outdoor shopping complex, Hutton Ranch Plaza, Spring Prairie Center and housing projects totaling 1,645 homes.

- Charging only 75 percent of the proposed impact fees for any developer who applies for a building permit by April 1, 2011.

- Delaying action on the fees, possibly for a few months or years.

- Totally eliminating the proposed fees.

A clear majority of the council has not publicly leaned toward any choice.

And the council easily could take one of the choices and modify it.

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.

As proposed by a consultant, 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 - could expect to pay millions of dollars.

One way the council could trim the fees would be to cut projects from a $12.4 million, 10-project list of street upgrades for which the road-impact fees are supposed to pay.

The leaders of the opposition against the proposed road-impact fees are the north side's three biggest developers - Wolford Development with Glacier Town Center, Mark Goldberg with the Spring Prairie Center and Philip Harris with Hutton Ranch Plaza.

The Wolfords and Harris are against all road-impact fees.

Goldberg wants the road-impact fees put on hold until the Kalispell economy renews its growth of the past few years - growth that stalled significantly in 2008. As a second choice, Goldberg last month proposed a five-year "grandfather" period for the fees.

Hovering about the issue is the possibility that lawsuits might be filed to challenge Kalispell's right to impose impact fees or how the city calculated the fees.