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Council amends parks master plan and approves related impact-fee code changes; single-family fee calculations updated
Summary
The council amended the Parks & Recreation Master Plan to align projects and expenditures for impact-fee calculations and approved companion code language to implement new impact fees; staff said the plan's project expenditures were reduced from about $52 million to $26 million and presented a per-person impact fee of $1,921.33.
The Arlington City Council approved amendments to the Parks & Recreation Master Plan and adopted a companion amendment to Arlington Municipal Code chapter 20.90 to implement updated concurrency and impact-fee calculations.
Amy, the city planner presenting the items, said the master-plan amendment revised chapters and appendices to add completed projects (for example, Smokey Point Community Park) and to include new items such as a food-truck court, York Park dog park and a pickleball court at Haller Middle School that previously lacked expenditure entries in the financial appendix. She told the council the plan's total listed expenditures used to calculate park impact fees decreased from around $52,000,000 to approximately $26,000,000, which forms the basis for the new impact-fee schedule.
On the companion code amendment to AMC 20.90 (concurrency and impact fees), Amy presented example fee calculations: she said the current single-family fee is $1,660 and cited a new single-family example amount of $2,536 under the proposed table; she also noted a per-person impact-fee figure of $1,921.33 that is used in the formula. Amy explained that Arlington currently sits among the lower-fee municipalities in the region and that with the update it would move to roughly the third-lowest level in her comparisons, and she described how population allocation (the city's projected population used in the formula) influences per-household fee outcomes.
Council members thanked staff for the outreach and work. Yvonne Giardo Van Ornam and Heather Logan both praised the plan and its community focus; Deborah Nelson moved the ordinance to amend the parks master plan and to authorize the mayor to sign it; the motion was seconded and carried on a voice vote. The council then moved and carried the ordinance amending AMC chapter 20.90 to implement the updated impact-fee schedule.
Amy told the council the last time the city had adjusted these fees was roughly 25 years ago, according to the record in the packet. She cautioned that comparing raw fee numbers across jurisdictions requires care because jurisdictions use different population allocations and project lists when deriving per-household fees.
The amendments set the policy basis and code to recover a portion of park improvement costs through developer impact fees; the council did not change the formula on the dais.
