County delays adding a new traffic impact fee

“I just don’t think this is the time to add a fee”

The traffic impact fee that would be assessed on new development that was proposed earlier this year will be delayed until the economy improves.

The Gunnison County Road and Bridge Capital Expansion Impact Fee would be assessed on new development in unincorporated Gunnison County based on the amount of traffic generated by the growth to make infrastructure improvements in places taking the brunt of the wear.
County manager Matthew Birnie said, “The impact fees are very directly related to the development and will help offset the costs that that development creates but are not captured by any tax sources.”
But while the idea sounded good when the fee was first discussed in an April work session, things aren’t looking as good in the county’s economy at the moment.
“My recommendation is that we revisit this in January to see where the economy is and then make some time to implement it,” he said. “I just don’t think this is the time to add a fee, even a well founded and what I think is a reasonable one. It’s just a tough time, economically, to add a cost,” said Birnie.
The County hired Durango-based RPI Consulting to conduct an analysis of the impact new developments would have on roadways and propose a way the County could recoup the cost of maintaining those roads. The result was a 50-page report, with research and calculations to support an impact fee.
The report takes census data to project population growth in the county over the next 20 years and matches it with data from the Institute of Transportation Engineers on how many vehicle trips that growth translates to.
“Overall the County can expect traffic volumes to increase by 62 percent in the next 20 years,” the report says. “This will bring the total number of trips on County roads to around 45,000 per day, most of which will originate from the residential sector.”
All of that traffic means eventually the county will have to perform more maintenance on the county’s highways. A fee to pay for the extra effort is one of three types of impact fees detailed in the report.
The other two types of fees would pay for the physical expansion of the road system that is needed to adequately move the additional traffic and for projects that were recently completed that will accommodate future growth.
Although there will need to be new calculations to account for changing prices when the plan is implemented, the added roads that are built to support the population through 2028 could cost the county about $52.3 million, the report says.
The report then proceeds to translate that dollar amount into the cost for an average daily trip (ADT) by a county resident and concludes, “Each ADT costs the county approximately $1,000 in capacity upgrades to the road and bridge system.”
That creates a funding problem since RPI analysts figure that the average Gunnison County resident pays $133 annually to capital improvements, through an earmarked fraction of the sales tax. Only about $25 of that goes to roads and bridges.
Assessing a fee on all new subdivision applications, building permits, “development on existing unimproved legal lots and to new subdivisions that may occur in the future,” the analysts say, can make up the difference.
But the concern for commissioner Jim Starr is that as contractors see the economy improving, they’ll start building again. He wants to have the fee in place when they do.
“Let’s say whenever we pick it up again, we decide to move forward. Is there two or three months of work that need to be done that we could do now before we could actually go to a public hearing?” Starr asked.
Birnie said although there wouldn’t be several months of work to do before a resolution could be passed, there were certain things the commissioners would want to work on.
“One thing you might want to look at is the commercial fee, because with the formulas used by the consultants they keep coming out high,” Birnie said. “Colorado property tax law already, sort of, overburdens that and we would probably want to come off what the recommendation is.”
The commissioners agreed that the delay in implementing the fee was a good idea, but they weren’t convinced they should start the process as late as January.
“My concern is that it will be February or March and we [will] get a significant number of proposals that are actually applications and we don’t have anything in place,” Starr said. “It’s more of the current taxpayers funding the growth and paying for the impacts that the new growth causes.”
Commissioner Hap Channell also pointed out that building season, which Birnie was hoping to have the fee in place for, is different and often later in the year than permitting season and the fee would be assessed on permits, not buildings.
With that, the commissioners directed Birnie to put the plan for implementing the fee on the agenda for the first meeting in January.