Fife staff urges council to credit existing site trips as city updates parks, transportation impact fees

FIFE

City staff and transportation consultants presented a proposed overhaul of Fife's parks and transportation impact fee program and advised the City Council to credit existing site trips regardless of whether past impact fees were paid. The study-session presentation identified legal and technical reasons for shifting the city's fee calculations to an Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) trip-based method and outlined options for fee districts, overlays and programmatic incentives.

Director Chris Larson, who led the presentation, said recent court guidance means impact fees must demonstrate an "essential nexus" and be "roughly proportionate" to the projected traffic impacts. He pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sheets v. El Dorado County and the Nolan/Dolan standards as drivers of the methodological change. "This burden is on the city," Larson said of proving the nexus and proportionality, and he described the ITE-based approach as a routinely updated, defensible data source.

The staff presentation compared the old, Fife-specific vehicle-miles-traveled method with the proposed PM-peak-trip approach and ran examples for local projects. Under the new method, school fees would be calculated on a per-student basis rather than square footage, and a retail use previously modeled under an apparel-store category would likely shift to a shopping-center code with higher peak-hour trip counts. Larson said those changes can materially increase fee estimates for some uses.

Consultant Michael Lapham told council members that breaking the city into multiple impact-fee districts would require highly detailed modeling that may not be practical for a city of Fife's size: "Life is pretty small. And trying to break it into districts ... it becomes this modeling just really nuanced effort to try to pick that all apart." He and staff recommended exploring a city-center overlay rather than full districting in most cases.

On the question of credits and vacancy timelines, staff recommended a clean approach: credit all existing trips at a site so that a new occupant pays only the net increase in trips, and do not adopt a short backward-looking vacancy expiration that would risk legal challenges. "Staff's recommendation is that we credit all existing trips that did not pay an impact fee regardless of how long they've been vacant," Larson said, adding that a vacancy-based approach would require additional, defensible traffic counting during the study period to be legally defensible.

Council members pressed staff on practical effects and incentives: whether very large retailers could be offered partial refunds from general revenues if they met employment or sales thresholds, how long credits should remain valid for phased developments, and whether an automatic multi-year phase-in for parks fees was appropriate. Larson reiterated that refunds are available only when fee proceeds are not spent on eligible projects within the statutory period and that any reimbursement program would effectively come from the general fund or require earmarking.

Planning commission recommendations and sample fee levels were discussed as reference points. The planning commission had suggested a parks-impact fee framework that starts at about $3,411 per average dwelling unit, with a possible phase to roughly $7,000 within three years; staff noted that adopting a dramatic, automatic step-up without council direction could raise litigation or economic concerns.

Next steps: staff asked council for direction on (1) whether to adopt the recommended crediting approach and avoid a short backward-looking vacancy expiration; and (2) a desired parks and transportation impact-fee level to return for formal ordinance consideration. Council members requested additional briefing materials and signaled interest in revisiting thresholds and phase-in timing before a vote at a future meeting.

The staff presentation and council questions will be revisited at a future meeting when council members consider ordinance language and final fee figures.