City eyes impact fee study

SANDPOINT — The city of Sandpoint’s Development Impact Fee Advisory Committee held its annual meeting Dec. 19 to observe an orientation presentation and consider an updated impact fee study.

The purpose of the advisory committee is to ensure adequate public facilities are available to serve new growth and development as well as promote orderly growth by developing uniform standards that allow the city to collect payments as a condition of development approval, City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton said.

By collecting impact fees from developers, the city can fund projects that accommodate the impacts of those developments. Fees acquired from each development are used only to cover projects affected by that specific development, Fonda Jovick, city attorney, said.

The current impact fee study was prepared in September 2011 by TischlerBise.

“We’re collecting fees based on the current study in place in four different categories: parks and recreation, police, fire and transportation,” Stapleton said.

Parks and recreation components include land acquisition and improvements and recreation facility space. The police category includes police station and communications infrastructure components. Fire includes station and apparatus equipment components and transportation includes streets, intersections, and multi-use pathways.

Impact fees, which have been historically controversial, are important because they ensure that growth pays for growth, Jovick said.

“Impact fees are a direct result of work that’s happening right now,” she said. “So your comprehensive plan, which is driven by data — can be survey data, can be actual numbers data, projected population growth data. Your comprehensive plan, once it’s completed, drives your master plan … which then dictates what you can have in your capital improvement plan. That capital improvement plan is the root of your impact fee study.”

The committee can use information moving forward to conduct an update of the current study. The current plan is to issue a request for quotes for a consultant after the first of the year, Stapleton said.

“Your responsibility is to give some direction for the study, and then when the study comes back, to really look at it coupled with where your growth is, non-residential and residential because you can collect impact fees for both, and then make a recommendation to city council on whether or not to make an adjustment to your impact fees,” Jovick said. “...You’re probably right to increase your impact fees to be quite frank; that’s probably what your study is going to show.”

According to Jovick, Sandpoint’s impact fees are on the significantly low side compared to other cities in the area.

“We compared Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls, Hayden, Sandpoint — all that are the bigger cities around — and Sandpoint is on the lower end of all of them,” she said.

Following questions from committee members, Jovick and Stapleton said that these changes can take as long as the committee needs to conduct and evaluate a fresh study. While the study could take anywhere from a few months to a year before it’s returned, the committee will need to determine how many meetings they need to mull over the report when it is completed.