Olympia Finance Committee clarifies park impact fee

The Olympia Finance Committee held its regular meeting yesterday, to brief the council about the park impact fee.

According to a presentation by FCS Group Consulting Principal John Ghilarducci, a “park impact fee” is a payment of money imposed upon development as a condition of development approval, which pays for public facilities needed to serve new development and can also be seen as a proportionate share of the cost of the public facilities.

“I would say to work on developing our impact fees and the reason that tonight we're doing a deeper dive into park impact fees is that in February of this year, we adopted a new Parks, Arts, and Recreation Plan,” Parks Planning and Design Manager Laura Keehan said.

“With that new plan and the new six-year capital investment strategy, that then requires that we take a look at our impact fees and match our impact fees to our capital investment strategy,” Keehan added.

Ghilarducci also clarified the limitations on how the fund can be utilized, specifying that the city cannot fund every development project from impact fees and the city does have other sources that it uses to pay for parks.

“There are rules also about how the fees can be spent, and you can only spend the money consistent with the adopted Capital Facilities Plan element of the Comprehensive Plan. [When] that plan is adopted, it serves as that list, and that becomes the basis of the impact. You have to spend the fees within ten years,” Ghilarducci said.

Each city different

Ghilarducci also discussed the calculation of the impact fee per resident, “The numerator is all the impact fee-eligible costs; these are the costs of providing parks for the needs of future users for growth. The denominator is the growth in population that we anticipate.”

The document included a comparison of Olympia’s fees with other cities, and City Manager Jay Burney raised a point about how the cities are different from each other regarding area, demographics, and decisions– making their fees only applicable to them alone.

“Even cities that might be our size and population might not have the park system that we have, they may not have the types of acreage, the amenities that we have, they may not invest in the same way in their parks like we do [in] Olympia,” Burney said. “And so that will definitely skew what they charge for impact fees in terms of what their growth and development park systems look like in their communities.”