Mountlake Terrace adopts updated transportation impact fee rate for 2026

The Mountlake Terrace City Council on Oct. 2 adopted a new transportation impact fee rate study and an ordinance setting the city's 2026 transportation impact fee methodology and rate.

The council voted to adopt the 2025 Transportation Impact Fee Rate Study and an ordinance modifying the Transportation Impact Fee Rate for 2026 after a public hearing on the study. Councilmember Woodard moved to adopt the ordinance; Councilmember Somer seconded the motion. The motion passed by voice vote.

The ordinance updates the city's impact-fee program to convert previous vehicle-trip calculations to person-trip calculations and to expand eligible projects beyond streets and intersections to include bicycle and pedestrian facilities, right-of-way acquisition related to capacity improvements, and signal/intersection upgrades. City engineer Rich Meredith and traffic engineer John Merrick presented the study and answered questions during the hearing.

Meredith told the council the last comprehensive update had been done in 2016, with smaller changes in 2018 and 2024, and that the new methodology aligns the fee with the city's Vision 2044 comprehensive plan. Meredith said the program now starts from a project list, removes elements that address only existing deficiencies, isolates the portion of each project attributable to new growth, and divides that eligible cost by projected person-trip growth to produce a per-person-trip fee.

The study used the 12th edition of the ITE Trip Generation manual as a starting point, converted vehicle trips to person trips using Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) data, and adjusted for pass-by trips, the presentation said. Staff proposed a per-person-trip rate of $6,051 for 2026; staff materials in the council packet include detailed rate tables for different land uses and unit types.

During discussion, Councilmember Woodard said the change "seems reasonable" and praised staff and consultants for the work. Councilmember Sonmore asked how the ordinance handles low-income housing; staff said the ordinance adds a definition aligned with state references and that the code includes mechanisms to provide credits or different treatments for qualifying low-income housing types.

No members of the public signed up to speak on the item during the public hearing.

The city attorney and staff advised that traffic impact fee revenues must be used for capacity-related projects and that fees held longer than 10 years must be refunded if not spent on eligible projects.

The ordinance and the rate study are available in the Oct. 2 council packet.

The council's action updates how the city collects contributions from new development for transportation capacity improvements and replaces a vehicle-trip approach with a person-trip methodology intended to better reflect multimodal and evolving transportation patterns.