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Post Falls staff outline proposed changes that would raise residential parks impact fees
Summary
City staff presented draft changes to impact fee methodology that would scale residential parks fees by house size and could raise the typical single-family parks fee from about $12,781 to roughly $16,000; staff officials said an option to add nonresidential park fees was rejected by the planning commission.
Post Falls Community Development Director Bob Seal presented a detailed update June 23 to the Post Falls Park and Recreation Commission on a multi-year review of the city's impact fees, saying the study seeks to better align fee calculations with project costs and recent land-value increases.
Seal told commissioners that impact fees are authorized by state statute and are assessed at building permit to fund capacity projects in parks, streets and public safety. He said the city's current parks fee for a single-family home is $12,781 and that the draft proposal would introduce scaling by house size so larger homes would pay more and smaller homes less. "If you did build your standard single-family detached house, the impact fee would now be going up to $16,000," Seal said. He added the proposal would cap the parks fee at the equivalent of a 3,500-square-foot home; under the draft that cap would be about $21,438.
The presentation described two approaches the city studied. Option A keeps parks fees focused on residential development while introducing size-based scaling; Option B would also assess nonresidential properties for parks but the planning and zoning advisory group recommended against Option B, citing concerns that adding nonresidential parks fees (especially lodging) would not materially reduce residential fees and could deter commercial development. Seal said a recent hotel project would have faced substantially larger fees under Option B and that the planning commission concluded that the trade-offs were unfavorable.
Seal also described technical refinements elsewhere in the draft package: the multimodal fee (for bike lanes and similar projects) would be moved into the streets fee; multifamily units would be assessed differently (examples shown at about $1,500 for some multifamily categories); and police-related impact fees would remain a smaller share (for example, roughly $1,700 for a single-family detached unit).
Commissioners pressed staff on several points: how the city allocates park acquisitions, how trip-generation rates affect fees for commercial uses, and whether the nonresidential proposal would discourage economic development. Seal said consultants used trip-generation methodology and workforce commuting data to estimate nonresident park usage; he noted the consultants removed hours attributable to the workforce when most employees leave the city during the day. He also said the draft reduces the combined average impact fee in one scenario by about 14 percent but that parks fees overall would rise under the preferred option.
Seal said the city will present the findings to council, and that the draft will include more detailed CIP (capital improvement plan) lists and the consultant's methodology. He asked commissioners to review the materials and prepare questions for the council presentation.
Next steps: staff will refine the draft based on feedback, publish the consultant analysis and present recommendations to city council for potential adoption. No formal vote occurred at the commission meeting.
Attribution: Bob Seal is identified in the transcript as Post Falls community development director and is the source of the numeric examples and policy descriptions above.
