Forney planning commission begins five-year impact-fee update; staff recommends city-limits study area

The Forney Planning and Zoning Commission convened a kickoff discussion on updating the city’s water and sewer impact fees after City Council appointed the commission to act as the capital improvements advisory committee. Richard Dormeyer, an engineer with Freeman Milliken, told the commission the update is a roughly six- to seven-month process that will analyze projected 10-year growth and the costs to serve that growth.

Dormeyer said state law (Texas Local Government Code, Chapter 395) allows cities to recover up to 50% of the infrastructure costs attributable to new development through impact fees collected at building permit issuance. “Everybody pretty much goes with the 50%,” Dormeyer said, adding there is a path to document higher recovery percentages but that it is more onerous.

The consultant outlined the technical approach: start with recent population and residential permit counts, apply a population projection (Dormeyer said a 3% annual rate has “lined up pretty well”), convert population to housing units using a household size factor (roughly 2.88–3.0), then estimate water and sewer facilities needed to serve that projected growth and allocate costs per new housing unit.

Commission staff and Dormeyer also discussed which service area to use for the study. Dormeyer said the recommendation will be to analyze the city limits. Planning staff explained that Forney’s service geography is complicated because sewer and water service areas differ and because the city can hold Certificates of Convenience and Necessity (CCNs) authorizing service outside city limits. Staff warned that property owners can remove land from the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) without municipal consent, which makes planning for ETJ areas less certain; for that reason staff recommended focusing the fee study on city limits.

Commissioners asked about the evidence base for the projection. Dormeyer said the plotted historical permit counts (residential building permits over multiple years) are used as the ‘‘actuals’’ through 2025 and that the firm will bring back comparative plots (3%, 5%, 7%) and maps showing likely developable areas at the next meeting. He said the firm has already done extensive water modeling that can be applied once the commission identifies the planning area.

Dormeyer said the commission will be asked later for five key inputs: whether the comprehensive land-use plan remains valid for projections; which population projection to use; where growth is expected to occur; what planning area should be studied (city limits vs. ETJ); and whether to include revitalization areas such as downtown or flood-plain redevelopment in the program. He told commissioners there was no rush to finalize answers and that the consultant would return next month with maps and preliminary scenarios.

Next steps: staff will distribute maps before the next meeting, the consultant will present comparative projections and draft service-area maps, and the commission will formally recommend the parameters that staff and the consultant will use to prepare the impact-fee calculations and the capital improvements plan.