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Council hears major update to transportation impact fee; staff propose multimodal shift and indexation
Summary
City staff proposed replacing the road-only transportation impact fee with a broader multimodal transportation fee that would include shared-use paths and update commercial trip-based charges; staff presented comparative fee scenarios and asked council to consider additional amortized homeowner-impact analysis.
City planning and public-works staff presented a comprehensive update to South Burlington’s transportation impact-fee ordinance, recommending a shift from a road-only model to a multimodal “transportation” fee that would fund sidewalks, shared-use paths, intersections and roadway capacity.
Paul Connor, director of planning and zoning, said the proposed ordinance would replace an older project list and apportion costs based on anticipated growth and modal needs. He told the council that some commercial trip-based charges—previously $1,000 per PM peak trip in the 2007 methodology—would be roughly $2,000 under the updated analysis because the fee base has not been adjusted for inflation and the new project list changes capacity assumptions.
Anna Dabrowski, the city’s data manager, walked council through two case studies used in the staff analysis: a 20-unit, two-bedroom multifamily building and a four-bedroom single-family home. The comparison highlights that school impact fees drive much of the per-unit difference between housing types and that the allocation fees for water/wastewater are structured separately from impact fees.
Erica Quallentoll, deputy director of capital projects, described policy choices embedded in the draft: moving shared-use paths from the recreation fee into transportation so both residential and nonresidential development share costs; enabling project-list changes by resolution (rather than ordinance amendments) to speed updates; and indexing fees annually to construction-cost indices.
Connor said the ordinance would also preserve developer credits for privately-built projects that appear on the city’s project list. “There are 2 ways to pay your impact fee,” he said: “you pay the city for the impact fee. The other is that you build the project,” a mechanism staff expect to continue to use.
Council members asked for additional aggregate analyses—examples included amortizing one-time fees over a 10–15 year period to show the annual homeowner impact and a consolidated comparison across neighboring municipalities that includes tax rates and typical permit fees. Staff agreed to produce the requested amortized, net-present-value comparisons and to return with a first reading at a future meeting.
