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McCall council directs staff to finalize Transportation Impact Analysis guidelines
Summary
Council voted to direct staff to finalize draft Transportation Impact Analysis (TIA) guidelines that set thresholds for memos vs full traffic studies, require scoping meetings, call for seasonal counts (including Saturday summer counts), and include five‑year updates for phased developments.
The McCall City Council voted Sept. 25 to direct staff to finalize a draft Transportation Impact Analysis (TIA) guidance document and return it to council via resolution for adoption.
City Engineer Morgan Stroud and consultant Lauren Knoxville presented the first draft to council, describing the document as a standardized tool to make traffic review predictable, transparent and proportional. The guidelines distinguish a transportation memo from a full transportation impact study: a memo is generally intended for projects generating fewer than 200 weekday trips (approximately fewer than 20 dwelling units), while an impact study is for projects over that threshold or for industrial buildings larger than 10,000 square feet.
Stroud explained the document’s emphasis on a mandatory scoping meeting where staff, the applicant and the applicant’s engineer agree on study area, land‑use codes used to calculate trip generation, seasonality and peak‑hour selection. The draft also recommends counts be collected during July peaks where possible and includes weekend (Saturday) midday counts to capture resort‑season conditions.
Kittleson consultants emphasized that the document requires phased projects to provide follow‑up traffic analyses (for example, an update every five years) so that long‑build‑out projects reflect changing background traffic and new development in the region. The guidelines also add multimodal analysis — a review of pedestrian, bicycle and transit impacts — that staff can require as part of the scoping.
Council members asked detailed legal and technical questions about proportionality (what a developer must remedy when their project makes an intersection’s level of service decline), how to treat vacation or seasonal rentals in trip generation, and whether the public will see TIAs. City Attorney Matt Johnson and public works director Nathan Stewart explained that the city must keep mitigations proportional to a project’s scale but also can require remedies if an applicant changes a previously acceptable condition into a failing one. Staff confirmed TIAs and related materials will be publicly available as part of the land‑use review and hearing records.
The council approved a staff motion by roll call to finalize the document and present a resolution to adopt the guidelines. No adoption vote was held that night; staff will incorporate council and public comments and return a final document and resolution for formal action.
Key elements to watch: thresholds distinguishing memos vs studies (200 weekday trips / ~20 dwellings), requirement for scoping meetings, seasonal and Saturday count guidance for resort‑season sensitivity, multimodal facility analysis, and five‑year follow‑ups for phased developments.
