After not changing since 2018, several Ada County fire districts' impact fees will be significantly overhauled.
Ada County Planning and Zoning commissioners moved to approve the Capital Improvement Plan and impact fees for the Eagle, Star and North Ada County Fire Protection Districts. The plans, proposed by consulting firm TischlerBise, had been previously adopted by the relevant city councils last year. Thursday’s decision from the Planning and Zoning Commission will bring relevant unincorporated areas under the plan.
Impact fees are one-time fees collected for developments in an area to maintain public services as communities expand and demands increase. These fees, paid by developers, are charged on a per-house and per-development basis. They are collected into a trust and held until they are approved to be spent on Capital Improvement Plan projects that are directly related to addressing regional growth.
This means that impact fees can't be dedicated to address inefficiencies due solely to age; an area's growth must be a contributing factor in order for any improvements to be made utilizing these fees.
“We can’t use impact fees to go back in and fix an old fire station that served an area … forever,” Leon Leston, Ada County community planning manager, said.
EAGLE
Eagle Fire Protection District’s previous impact fee study, conducted in 2018, charged uniform amounts for residential and non-residential buildings. Under the previous plan, development impact fees were $897 and non-residential impact fees were $360.
Impact fees will be rising substantially to cover projected growth and rising costs.
The 2023 plan will have different amounts for each development type based upon its expected impact to the district, Brent Moore, senior community and regional planner for the American Institute of Certified Planners, said.
The proposed plan has had separate impact fee amounts for each category and are as follows:
Single-family housing $2,111Multi-family housing: $1,108Retail: $2,779Office: $1,071Industrial: $481Institutional: $1,064
“In addition to just construction costs rising, the fee being collected at one point probably wasn’t actually even going to get to what the cost of construction was shortly after that was adopted,” Leston said.
The substantial increases seen in the Capital Improvement Plan are also compounded by the lag between fee studies.
“State law only requires that these be updated (every) five years at a minimum, and a lot of jurisdictions wait a lot of time to do that, so you kind of have this natural falling-behind that occurs with the fees being collected,” Leston said.
Five years ago it cost about $400 per square foot to build a fire station. Today that number has risen to $850 per square foot, Colin McAweeney, senior fiscal and economic analyst for TischlerBise, said.
The steep increases align with the amount of calls that a fire department would anticipate to receive in its service of a particular type of development, McAweeney said. Housing and retail developments were found to incur the biggest costs for Eagle, leading to their having the highest fees attached.
“The idea is that the capital improvement plan sets the amount of the impact fee, and it is an analysis of how new growth affects facilities within the district,” William Gigray, attorney at White Peterson Gigray & Nichols representing the Eagle Fire Protection District, said. “It’s not to improve the level of service, it is simply to maintain the level of service.”
To maintain the level of service for the next 10 years, the Eagle Fire District will relocate its Floating Feather Road station and add new stations at Colchester and Eagle Road and the Northeast Foothills. This will constitute 14,126 square feet in new station space. From 2022 to 2032, the Eagle population is projected to increase 69% with 16,969 new residents expected, the Capital Improvement Plan said.
INCREASES IN STAR
Like Eagle, Star previously had uniform impact fees for its fire district, with residential development paying a fee of $809 and non-residential development paying a fee of $380. Though Star’s impact fee increases for residential developments were substantial, the non-residential changes were far less pronounced in comparison to Eagle.
In a shift from the pattern of increases, office and industrial impact fees saw decreases under the proposal. The proposed fees are as follows:
Single-family: $2,152Multi-family: $1,227Retail: $829Office: $323Industrial: $145Institutional: $582
To maintain the current level of service, Star will be adding three stations over the next 10 years: at Floating Feather Road; at Purple Sage Road, which will split service with Middleton; and at Highway 16 and Aerie. Additional training amenities will also be added to the Kingsbury Road station through the Capital Improvement Plan.
From 2022 to 2032 the Star population is projected to increase 71%, with 14,929 new residents expected, the Capital Improvement Plan said.
NORTH ADA
The North Ada County Fire & Rescue District will also see a change from the previously uniform development impact fees of $647 for residential development and $320 for non-residential development. The overall changes were less pronounced when compared to Eagle and Star.
Retail and single-family housing impact fees saw the biggest jumps increasing to $1,238 and $879, respectively. The population increase for the North Ada County Fire & Rescue District was also comparatively smaller, with a 20% increase in population expected from 2022 to 2032, with 4,262 new residents.
The general increase in impact fees was framed by the commissioners and consultants as a necessary “catching-up” for the county after a period of high inflation.
“There’s been a lot of changes since 2018 and we have had (a) tremendous amount of growth in Ada County overall, and I think we just have to try to do the best we can and catch up,” Dawn Retzlaff, Ada County Planning and Zoning commissioner, said. “These are one-time impact fees, and hopefully it’ll alleviate some of the concern for the regular residential taxpayer.”
Representatives for the fire districts reported no objections from members of the public were reported in regard to the impact fee changes. The Planning and Zoning Commission's recommendation of approval for the fire district impact fees will be reviewed by Ada County Commissioners in a future meeting.
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