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Canby council seeks deep cuts, phase‑in to limit parks SDCs that could double fees for new homes
Summary
After staff and consultant analysis showed parks system development charges (SDCs) could rise from about 3.8% to more than 8% of a home's price under the current project list, councilors asked staff to run three reduction scenarios and consider a multi‑year phase‑in to limit near‑term fee increases and create incentives for affordable housing.
Canby City Council spent the bulk of its meeting debating how to shrink a proposed parks system development charge package that staff said could make the city's SDCs among the state's highest.
Consultant Todd Chase said the city's existing SDCs amount to roughly 3.8% of a home's base price, but the projects on the current draft list would push total fees to about 8.2% at the calculated maximum. "What the SDC update really is to identify kind of a maximum legally defensible charge the city could charge," Chase said, and noted the Parks Advisory Committee had already trimmed roughly $18 million from the list, moving the metric to about 7.8%.
The council debated how far to cut and how quickly to phase increases. Councilor Davis urged caution about pricing developers out of building in Canby and asked staff to test a three‑year phase‑in that would freeze fees in the first year and ramp up more slowly. "We need to keep these SDCs down as much as possible to encourage affordable housing," Davis said.
Councilor Patton offered a deeper set of cuts that, in his rough math, would drop the overall SDC package by about $58–59 million and produced a placeholder scenario the council asked staff to model. Patton said he focused cuts on high‑cost athletic‑field projects and on projects already budgeted, for example removing Maple Street Park because it is funded.
Staff and the consultant identified tradeoffs: cutting major projects lowers the fee but may leave the city with fewer amenities and could shift pressure to other funding sources. Chase told the council SDCs are commonly recalibrated every five years; he also offered a method to weight land‑price and construction‑cost indices separately to better reflect real cost changes.
The council settled on a process: staff will run three scenarios (the Parks & Rec board's recommendation, Councilor Patton's cuts, and Councilor Davis's cuts), return results to the Parks & Rec Advisory Committee on March 17, and bring updated calculations back to council (tentatively the week of March 25). The council also asked staff to prepare options for SDC exemptions or incentives for affordable housing that could be handled administratively or by code change.
Next steps: staff will produce the modeled scenarios, share draft materials with councilors and Parks & Rec, and schedule the public hearing that staff said is targeted for May 6. The council did not adopt any changes to SDCs at the meeting; no votes on fees were taken.
