Ponderay adopts study calling for impact fees

PONDERAY — The City Council formerly adopted a study Monday that, if added to city code, will lead to uniform impact fees assessed against any new development within the city.

The fees would be used to mitigate the impacts on city streets from projected development. The details were hashed out in an unusual joint public meeting of the council and the city’s planning and zoning committee.

A Transportation Development Impact Fee Study and Capital Improvement Plan, conducted by David Evans and Associates, identified three types of development that the fees would be assessed against: residential, commercial and industrial. Each would charged based on a formal schedule.

By 2035, the study projected that residential housing will increase from 521 to 1,443 units, commercial development will grow from 1.37 million to 4.2 million square feet, and industrial development will increase from 243,531 to over 1 million square feet.

All that development will increase traffic on Ponderay city streets and the surrounding state highways.

Based on an average statistical-based calculation, the one-time impact fee for a new residential unit, or additional dwelling unit in Ponderay would be $931.25.

The fee would not apply to remodels or replacement buildings, according to David Evans and Associate project manager Lisa Key, the study’s lead.

Commercial and industrial developments would be charged $1.57 per square foot, or $15,700 for a new 10,000 square foot commercial store.

Not everyone was on board with the fee structure. Planing and Zoning Committee member John Corn felt the fees were skewed toward those who could least afford it. He noted the fee would be the same for a modest, single family home or a 6,000 square foot “McMansion.”

“I think that having a formula of X dollars per dwelling unit is grossly unfair to the larger houses,” Corn said. “It makes those people free riders compared to the small units.”

“If you’re going to be unfair, be unfair to the big guy, not the little guy,” he said later in the discussion.

Unknown variables, however — number of people actually living in the household, number of vehicles per household, for example, or seasonal vacation homes — made it a challenge to be perfectly equitable, according to Key. That’s why using accepted statistical information based on multiple studies is considered the preferred method.

“You need a statistical basis for a proportional fee schedule,” Key said.

Why are the fees needed anyway? To generate a funding source to fund mitigation measures need to counter the effect of the expected development, and the additional vehicle trips they generate. Those extra trips will require additional transportation services, according to Key.

The study looked at both existing and projected traffic volumes based on expected growth. Current traffic showed “no existing deficiencies,” according to Key. Not so during the 20-year study period.

The big issue in 20 years will be the intersections of U.S Highway 95 and both Schweitzer and Kootenai Cutoff Roads, Bonner Mall Way and U.S. Highway 95, and state Route 200 at Eastgate Drive. Those and other intersections along Kootenai Cutoff Road and Bonner Mall Way will eventually require additional lanes, intersection modification such as roundabouts, raised channelization and other work at those locations where capacity and levels of service drop below acceptable thresholds.

Both highways 95 and 200 also fail in the general Ponderay area. Any mitigation to those roadways, however, will be the responsibility of the Idaho Transportation Department, and out of the hands of Ponderay. The city can lobby for relief to ITD, but they can’t use impact fees to improve the state highway.

The total cost to mitigate intersections under the jurisdiction of the city of Ponderay was estimated by the study at $5,655,000.

But Union Pacific Railroad has said they plan to close the Eastgate Drive, which was included in the study’s estimate, so the cost will decrease accordingly, Key said.

The mitigation measures and their costs are only an estimate for planning purposes, Key emphasized. The details will need to be worked out in the future by the city, project-by-project, spread out over a 20-year period.