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CASE TRANSPORTATION IMPACT FEES By: Steven Jankowski, City Engineer Background: At the April 25, 1995 Road and Bridge Committee meeting, a discussion of transportation impact fees was discussed as a more equitable vehicle for generating funds necessary to construct collector streets. Such collector streets will be required to handle traffic from newly developing areas. In addition, improvements may be required to existing arterial roadways as a result of the need to increase the capacity to handle additional traffic from the new developments. You will recall our existing policy requires developers to participate in the construction of collector roadways when they happen to be required through their particular subdivision. This leaves adjacent developments which are lucky enough not to require collector streets directly through their territory to benefit without payment. A survey of communities throughout the Metropolitan Area revealed that a number of municipalities do collect fees uniformly from developments to generate funds for collector street construction and arterial road improvements. You will recall that it was the consensus of the Road and Bridge Committee to pursue development of such a modification to the City of Ramsey's current funding mechanism. At the April 25th meeting, City Council concurred and directed Staff to prepare the necessary documents for modifying our ordinances to adopt such a transportation impact fee policy. In order to facilitate the development of necessary policy and ordinance changes, Staff solicited material from the Cities of Savage and Prior Lake. These materials are enclosed for your review. At the present time in the City of Savage, single family home developers pay $1,400 per developable acre, plus a $229 fee on each building permit. Non-single family homes developed pay $3,054 per net developable acre. In Prior Lake, developers are charged $1,500 per developable acre, plus a $400 fee on each building permit. In Maple Grove, a charge of $2,000 per residential unit is assessed for future transportation costs. Interestingly enough, when the City was considering establishing an impact fee for the area surrounding Sunwood Drive, an analysis showed the proposed impact fee to be $1,666 per acre. From review of all of the above referenced sources, it would appear there is a reasonable basis for establishing an impact fee within the above price ranges. Enclosed for your consideration is a draft policy which states the rationale for the impact fee and establishes the procedure for its collection. Recommendation: I am recommending that we establish a transportation trunk charge of $500 per residential lot created on all new subdivisions and $1.50 per square foot of commercial building space. It is estimated that the residential charge would have generated in the range of $900,000 over the past five years if they had been in place. It is my opinion that the amount can be justified as a reasonable amount consistent with the impact cost of the development as is evident from our analysis of the proposed Sunwood Drive impact fees. Since each residence generates the same number of trips regardless of parcel size, both rural and urban development contribute to the impact equally. In addition, if this is to be a true impact fee, an equitable charge should be established for commercial land use. Traffic generation