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Planning commission recommends FY26 fee schedule; adds fixed review fee for tower RF review
Summary
The commission voted unanimously to recommend the Community Planning Department’s draft fiscal-year 2026 user-fee schedule to the borough assembly. The department proposed a new fixed fee to cover radio-frequency review costs for communication-tower conditional-use reviews and kept most permits unchanged.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough Planning Commission on March 11 recommended the adoption of the Community Planning Department’s draft FY26 user-fee schedule to the borough assembly, voting 10-0.
Community Planning Director Kellen Spillman told commissioners the department’s annual review showed most fees would remain unchanged for FY26; the sole proposed change is a new fixed fee to cover third-party radio-frequency (RF) engineering reviews tied to conditional-use reviews for communication towers. Spillman said the borough’s code requires applicants to demonstrate RF needs for certain towers, and the borough lacks in-house expertise to verify those technical analyses. The fixed fee (estimated around $2,000) is intended to replace an inconsistent “pay actual cost” approach and to simplify administration.
Spillman said the department’s prior comprehensive fee update (FY24) increased many fees to recover a greater share of staff time; the department targets recovering roughly 25–50% of the staff cost per service. He told the commission that the average conditional-use permit currently costs the borough about $3,500 in staff time and that the department was recovering roughly 31% under the updated rates. Spillman said zoning and floodplain permits remain set to $0 to keep compliance barriers low; those items are high-volume and the department prioritizes public compliance and FEMA-related risks.
Commissioners asked about the frequency of fee reviews, whether inflation indexing would be applied and how the new RF-review fee would be collected. Spillman said the department updates its analysis annually and expects to discuss modest indexing next year. He explained the RF-review fee simplifies payment and administration and should align expected applicant costs with the department’s actual third-party review expense.
The motion to recommend the FY26 fee schedule to the borough assembly carried unanimously. The commission’s recommendation and the staff materials will be forwarded to the assembly as part of the borough’s budget hearings.
