Kane County Board OK’s Impact Fee Ordinance
The Kane County Board voted 21-5 Tuesday (March 14, 2017) to approve a new impact fee ordinance.
What does that mean for Kane County residents?
It means the county will be continuing a fee program created in 2004 to ensure new development pays at least a part of the cost for building new roads. It’s basic purpose is tax relief for existing residents.
“During the rapid growth years in the ’90s and early 2000s Kane County residents demanded a solution to the problem of development projects increasing traffic in the local area outside of the projects,” said Drew Frasz, chairman of the Kane County Transportation Committee and the Impact Fee Advisory Committee. “Taxpayers were then burdened with major and expensive road improvements. The impact fee program helped level the playing field in funding these improvements.”
The dollar amounts being asked from developers are about 10 percent lower, on average, than the previous impact fee ordinance schedule.
Examples of the fees OK’d this week include $1,641 for a single-family home and $2,485 per 1,000 square feet for a commercial retail development up to 50,000 square feet in Central Kane County. A chart of the impact fees is published below, and online documents can be found on the Impact Fee page of the KDOT website.
The Impact Fee Advisory Committee has been meeting since early 2016 with stakeholders — developers, economic development commissioners, elected officials and others — to make sure the new fee schedule considered all points of view.
Two public hearings were held on the impact fee plan, one on land use held last year and another on Jan. 4, 2017, for consideration of the updated ordinance and fee schedule.
Anderson Road overpass in Elburn was partially funded with County Road Improvement Impact Fees.
What Is An Impact Fee?
An impact fee is a fee imposed by a local government on a new or proposed development project to pay for all or a portion of the costs of providing public services to the new development.
Generally, the fee is due and payable at the time of building permit. There are other allowable mechanisms in the ordinance, but this is the typical trigger.
The state requires Kane County to renew its impact fee ordinance every five years, but county officials typically review the document every year. In recent years, the trend has been to hold the line on annual increases, but officials have the option under the new ordinance to increase the “multiplier” if they so choose.
To understand how it works, you first have to understand a little about the process. Kane County transportation experts review traffic projections and “highlighted deficiencies on the county highway system” where improvements will be needed to accommodate new development. They come up with an estimate the cost of the improvements and compare it to the impact of specific development units — such as single-family home, multi-family residential, commercial retail, supermarket, industrial development or daycare center — to determine the dollar amount of the impact fee.
Officials then cut that fee in half — automatically — so that, in essence, the impact fee pays about half of the impact of new development. That number was further reduced by 10 percent in the previous five-year impact-fee ordinance and another 10 percent in the ordinance approved Tuesday.
“There’s some art to the science,” KDOT Director and County Engineer Carl Schoedel said. “It’s a balancing mechanism, and our goal is to make it as fair as possible. We’re not piling on the developer here.”
The trick of any impact fee, of course, is to make sure new development is helping to pay for new infrastructure while at the same time not charging fees that would discourage investment or economic development.
Schoedel said there is a long list of significant transportation projects that have been “pushed across the goal line by this funding source.”
Road-improvement impact fees have supplemented transportation revenues by approximately $2.5 million a year and assisted in implementing a number of county highway projects. Recent examples include the Stearns Road bridge corridor, Anderson Road overpass and extension, Orchard Road widening, Plank Road realignment, intersection improvements at Burlington Road and Corron Road.
Kane County impact fee ordinance divides the county into three sections — north, central and south — and identifies the impact fee per unit in each area. The fees are charged to developers of residential, commercial and industrial properties according to the size of the project. (See the chart below for more information.)
Additional information can be found on the county’s website at http://www.co.kane.il.us/dot/impactFees.aspx.
