Brandon Leuallen, The Business Times

During a stakeholder meeting Nov. 19, interim City Manager Andrea Phillips and Community Development Director Tamra Allen presented data about how linkage fees would be calculated and utilized by the City of Grand Junction.

Stakeholders at the meeting included local builders, business owners and mortgage brokers. The meeting is available at engagegj.org/impact-fees-study, titled “Focus on Affordable Housing Linkage Fee.”

Allen said, “Our ultimate goal is to establish the linkage between nonresidential development in the city and the need to provide housing at certain income levels. What the wages are, the salaries are, where there’s a gap, there’s a potential role for the city to provide support in the form of impact-fee funding.”

She also clarified charging linkage fees to residential buildings is not being recommended.

“Early on, there was talk about having a linkage fee on residential development,” Allen said. “Our recommendation here is that this should be on nonresidential development, given the nature of the economy here. This is not typically where a linkage fee is assessed on residential development. It is usually in tourist towns, where permanent employment is generated off of residential events.”

The city hired TischlerBise, a fiscal, economic and planning consulting firm located in Bethesda, MD, and Boise, ID, to study fees and recommend new potential fees and potential ways to increase existing fees. 

TischlerBise claims on its website it is “the only national firm focused exclusively on analyzing the cost-of-growth for local governments and finding ways to raise revenue without raising taxes.”

The proposed linkage fee would be about $10 per square foot for retail building projects. For example, one stakeholder calculated that it would add about $1 million to the cost of a large retail building like Costco.

Fees per square foot would be approximately $5.50 for office buildings, $1 for industrial buildings, $6.50 for institutional buildings and $4.50 for lodging buildings.

Asked if the city had studied the impact in other communities with linkage fees, the presenter said they did not have that currently.

One attendee said she contacted other communities with linkage fees, and it had really halted the new building. Allen said “it would be great to get that information if she had already made those contacts. It would be helpful for staff to bring it forward to council.”

One stakeholder who said he is a builder said, “From a builder’s perspective it’s going to make development more difficult in the community.” And he added, “Builders are just going to do business outside of city limits.”

Later in the meeting there were some more heated comments from the builder, who said, “It’s getting to be a joke. I’m so disappointed in the city of Grand Junction. Every time I turn around there are more fees.”