Brandon Leuallen, The Business Times (Story updated 12/31/2024)

The City of Grand Junction is exploring options to significantly raise transportation and recreation impact fees on new construction to help pay for road infrastructure and parks.

Impact fees are historically charged to new residential and commercial development to fund the increased infrastructure use from the occupants of those buildings. The Business Times attended the Parks and Transportation Impact Fees Community Meeting on Dec. 10.

A small number of stakeholders and community members attended the community meeting to discuss the formulas and question city officials and Carson Bise, president of TischlerBise, the consulting firm developing the potential impact fee increases to present to the Grand Junction City Council.

Regarding transportation fees, after hearing some of the details, stakeholders lamented that alternative options for paying for the increase in scope of transportation were missing from the presentation.

One stakeholder, Keith Ehlers, said, “It might be interesting to explore from the community, truly, what appetite there is to include alternative or additional methods for paying for these things, so it’s not just on the limited amount of payees right now.”

Ehlers also mentioned the community may not be aware of the unintended consequences of raising the fees to pay for increased multimodal infrastructure.

“Everybody answered the question of, ‘Yes, we like trees. Yes, we like bikes.’ We just haven’t been asked that next question of, ‘To what extent?’ Or, ‘Do we want these trails and bikes for commuting, or do we want them for recreation, or what is the trade off against home prices?’”

Of note, there was no data provided at the meeting about how much raising impact fees could slow down building or raise home prices in the area.

The presentation showed increases going to the maximum legal limit. A 1,500- to 2,000-square-foot home has a current transportation fee of $5,028. The recommended increase is $2,836, which would be about a 56 percent increase. Commercial fees are also recommended to be increased to the maximum legal limit with retail fees, currently at $7,717, rising to $11,012.

When it comes to the park fee, the recommendation is to change from a flat 10 percent land dedication to a per-unit fee. For example, the current average cost for parks on one 1,501- to 2,000-square-foot unit is $1,429. The recommended increase of $3,215 would bring the unit fee to $4,644. Which would be more than a 200 percent increase.

Ehlers asked, “What would you say is the biggest reason that these fees are doubling or more over existing fees?”

Grand Junction Engineering and Transportation Director Trent Prall responded, “We’ve had a lot of discussion with Carson (Bise) about best practices and were pretty much an anomaly doing the 10 percent dedication. So, I think we’re more in line with best practices, but it is a big reason for the increase,” referring to switching from land dedication to a per-unit fee.

Later, the discussion devolved into how the city’s vision to make a more bike-and-pedestrian-friendly community is partly causing the transportation-fee increases. It included the following exchange between Prall and Regina Stout of Keller Williams:

Stout: “I can tell you I drive a lot of miles showing houses. I never see 20 people on a bicycle in a given day.”

Prall: “Part of that is as a society over the last 70-80 years we’ve been all autocentric. It’s only in the last 20-30 years we’ve been trying to get more balance and more space allocated to where people would be able to bike.”

Prall again: “We can park 20 bikes where we can park one car.”

Stout: “So, as we are doing all of this analysis, are we looking at how many people are using bikes that justify all of these huge impact fees for the roadways with the bikes and pedestrians, or are we following an ideology?”

Prall: “When do we build bike facilities? After we’ve gridlocked up?”

Prall again: “Right now we’re probably at 1-2 percent of all trips are taken by bikes, and I think that’s optimistic.”

Stout: “So, we’ve got these huge impact fees to pay for 1-2 percent?”

Prall: “We’re trying to grow that to something different, so we don’t have to spend even more fees in order to create the initial lanes we need to get around the community using cars.”

Local builder Merrit Sixbey of Merrit and Associates said, “There’s a lot of young families out there that want a home. We keep making it impossible, but we sure have enough money to ride bikes.”

Total impact of fee increases

Charts from the current City of Grand Junction impact-fee study show implementing the total maximum supportable fees on a 2,000-square-foot home would increase fees from the current $8,793 to $17,041, a 93.8 percent increase.

At a Dec. 17 stakeholder meeting Carson Bise, president of consulting firm TischlerBise, said current Grand Junction impact fees are already indexed for inflation.

Bise also said, “Transportation and Parks are the biggest reasons for these increases.”

The presentation titled “Draft 2024 Impact Fee Study” on engagegj.org/impact-fees-study says, “Impact fees may only be used for capital improvements or debt service for growth-related infrastructure. They may not be used for operations, maintenance, replacement of infrastructure or correcting existing deficiencies.”

The 10-year capital plan shows capital projects for Engineering and Transportation would total $212,139,300, and Parks and Recreation projects would total $175,626,420.

City Engineering and Transportation Director Trent Prall confirmed the numbers provided for the study were based on the new Transportation Engineering Design Standards adopted by the city council Dec. 6, 2023. It includes updated multimodal infrastructure specifications.

Specifically the new standards increase the cost of construction by 49 percent on collector roads (low-to-moderate-capacity roads that serve to move traffic from local streets to arterial roads)  with speed limits under 35 mph. It would put the total at $8,193,526 per mile to construct and includes additional purchase of right of way.