City staff recommends ending automatic backfill for affordable-housing impact-fee waivers

City staff told the Johnson City Council at a workshop that state law permits local governments to waive development impact fees for qualifying affordable housing projects without requiring the city to “backfill” the fee fund from general revenues, and recommended the city stop routinely paying those waived fees.

The recommendation — presented by staff members identified in the workshop as Mike, Tamara and Ashley — would repeal the council’s existing resolution (Resolution 44-24) that had required the city to pay impact fees for projects that received the affordable-housing waiver. “The state statute allows ... a city can waive those impact fees without backfilling,” Mike told the council. He and other staff framed the proposal as a starting point for discussion rather than a final rule.

Why it matters: Under the existing local policy, the city uses general-fund dollars to replace revenue the impact-fee fund would have collected; staff told council that for the current group of proposed projects the backfill obligation would total about $760,000 for one housing authority project and that, across six applications submitted by the July 1 deadline, the city’s projected share under the existing policy would be roughly $4.19…