Council considers cutting fees or projects

A majority of the Kalispell City 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.

At a Monday workshop session, the city staff supported the second choice.

The council is expected to tackle that choice at another yet-to-be-scheduled workshop session.

At this time, 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 in 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 and Kluesner also want any project to be exempt from the fees if its preliminary plat has been approved between July 1, 2004 and July 1, 2009. The others did not take firm stances on that proposal, although a few voiced support for some type of phased-in approach.

The council gave its staff several tasks to complete by the next workshop, including:

- Getting a legal opinion on whether the fees can be trimmed by an arbitrary percentage.

- Coming up with a trimmed-back list of road improvements to be paid with the fees.

- Coming up with a plan to use development extension agreements for roads created by developers.

Development extension agreements are commonly 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.

- Obtain examples of how Missoula's and Bozeman's road impact fees are applied -- dollar amounts on specific types of buildings, phase-in strategies and other matters. These two are the only Montana cities with road impact fee systems similar to Kalispell's proposal.