Cheney to consider traffic fees

By JOHN McCALLUM

Managing Editor

Cheney’s Planning Commission got a closer look at its March 11 meeting at how proposed transportation impact fees might be imposed on development in the city — but not before doing a bit of housecleaning business.

The commission found itself needing to elect new officers with the appointment of former commission chair Vince Barthels to fill a seat on City Council. To that end, the members unanimously elected Commissioner Rick Mount to the position, with Commissioner Vara Lyn Conrath continuing as vice chair.

After the election, which involved swapping agenda items, Mount excused himself from the subsequent traffic impact fee discussion due to a conflict of interest. The long-time Cheney resident and civic leader works at the same law firm as Cheney city attorney Stanley Schwartz.

Morrison Majerle senior transportation planner Bill White told the commission that transportation impact fees are utilized by a number of municipalities, including the cities of Spokane, Liberty Lake and Coeur d’Alene, noting in his presentation that those fees represent a “payment of money conditioned against new development to pay a proportionate share of costs associated with street improvements.”

State law allows for these fees as long as the funds are used for new development and not existing street issues such as potholes, etc. The city is looking at imposing fees on new development south of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroad tracks to deal with traffic congestion and impacts to emergency services in the area known as Terra Vista.

The City Council imposed a six-month moratorium on development in the area in December 2018 to address these issues. White said transportation fees can be used for design and construction of improvements that “reasonably add vehicle capacity to the city street system,” with a typical application being their use as matching funds for securing additional money from state and federal grant or loan programs.

“So you go into it with that perspective,” White said. “They have to benefit new development moving forward.”

White provided a three-tiered process for imposing transportation fees, with each tier addressing specific traffic remedies according to the number units and type of construction proposed — i.e. single family or multifamily. Tier One would cover adding right turn traffic pockets on 1st Street at Cheney-Plaza and Cheney-Spangle roads at an estimated cost of just over $1 million.

Tier Two would provide several alternate routes for traffic on the other side of the tracks through improvements to Front Street, Alki Street and the creation of an Easy Street corridor — something White said was included in the original development proposals for Terra Vista by developer Steve Emtman. These improvements carry an estimated price tag of $3.049 million.

Tier Three projects would involve widening Cheney-Plaza and Cheney-Spangle from 1st Street to just past the UP tracks with the former and to the Grove Apartments with the latter. Estimated costs for these projects is just over $5.3 million.

White said there was no order of importance associated with the projects. To pay for them, the imposed fees would be calculated using a baseline of existing number of units, additional assumption of units, a 50 percent private development allocation and daily trip calculation totals resulting from the proposal.

Using these calculations, an example in White’s proposal illustrated that a development of 100 single-family homes requiring Tier Two improvements calculated at $1,745 per unit would bring in $174,500 in transportation impact fees.

White said there are benefits associated with these types of fees for cities and for developers, such as securing funds up front to help with projects (cities) while promoting cost sharing of capacity improvements with future development (developers). He also said that developer organizations have expressed support for these fees because they are associated with creating more efficient permitting processes in the jurisdictions that have utilized them.

Issues for developers include mitigation contingent on land use actions while cities have 10 years to utilize the development moneys or risk returning them — with interest — to the developer. White said the latter shouldn’t ever arise as state law allows transportation impact fees to be used for things as simple as project designs.

“I always tell my clients, ‘if you’re not using it, you’re not trying,’” White said.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].