El Mirage council reviews draft development-impact fees; asks staff to add projects, calculate credits

El Mirage Common Council members spent a two-hour-plus June 19 work session reviewing preliminary development-impact fee calculations presented by consultant Carson Vice of TishlerBice and asking staff to refine the draft before the formal adoption process.

The council was presented draft fees for parks, police, fire, streets and wastewater and a range of illustrative examples (single-family house, commercial building, data center). Council members asked staff to add a south-side fire station and a park-oriented community/teen center to the Infrastructure Improvement Plan (IIP) for fee consideration, to calculate credits tied to developer contributions and outstanding bond proceeds, and to return a revised set of numbers about a month after the work session.

Why it matters: development-impact fees are one-time charges imposed on new development to pay for growth-related capital improvements. The city’s draft study is intended to meet Arizona’s legal tests for nexus, proportionality and benefit timing; adoption would create new ongoing administrative, auditing and reporting obligations for finance and development services.

Carson Vice emphasized that the draft figures are preliminary and “not set in stone,” and described three common fee methodologies: buy-in (cost recovery for oversized or recently built facilities), consumption-based (incremental expansion tied to current service levels) and plan-based (allocates costs from a master plan or CIP and separates growth vs. non-growth shares). Vice said the study uses a mix of methods: buy-in for identified roadway investments, and consumption/incremental approaches for parks, police and fire.

Draft revenue and project highlights provided to council: - Growth assumptions: about 900 additional residents and roughly 5,500 new jobs over a 10-year horizon; about 5,300,000 square feet of projected…