Village Board considers eliminating impact fees
By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
The East Troy Village Board spend more than an hour discussing the possibility of eliminating impact fees at the Aug. 3 meeting before deciding to table the issue to be picked up at a Committee of the Whole meeting for more discussion.
The board heard a presentation from Brandon Foss of R.A. Smith National Inc., a surveying and engineering company in Brookfield, the village contracted to look at its impact fees. Foss had a series of meetings with village Clerk-Treasurer Eileen Suhm, Deputy Clerk Judy Spaight and Department of Public Works Director Mike Miller, and village attorney Linda Gray to discuss each impact fee separately and draft recommendations.
The recommendations to the board were to:
- Keep the sewer connection fee and update it every two years;
- Keep the water facilities impact fee in the boosted zone only and delete the remaining water impact fees;
- Delete the park impact fee category and instead negotiate a “park improvement fee” as part of future developers agreements;
- Delete the police impact fee category because the money from it can’t be used to purchase vehicles (it has to be used for permanent structures) and there is no need for a police substation and East Troy already has a police station;
- Keep the existing library impact fee and look at it again after the results of the ongoing library needs study is finished to determine what needs are there for growth; and
- Look at other options available such as dedication of land, fee-in-lieu of dedication, financial contributions imposed on a developer as a condition of subdivision approve, voluntary contributions and others, to fund the necessary improvements that are a result of growth in the village.
Foss said, because of the changes in the statutes over the past 10 years or so in regard to impact fees, some of the area communities like Lake Geneva and New Berlin have eliminated impact fees because with the new laws, they are cumbersome to manage.
Suhm said keeping track of the impact fees and when/how they can be used (there is a 10-year time limit and then they have to be refunded to the current property owner), is an “administrative nightmare.”
The board discussed the pros and cons of eliminating the impact fees at length debating whether it was in the village’s best interest to eliminate the ones they can, but one of the sticking points came when Trustee Dusty Stanford wanted to know if the board eliminated the fees would Teronomy still have to pay the impact fees for the three apartment buildings they are putting up in the Honey Creek complex. Gray said the contract with Teronomy states that it has to pay whatever impact fees are in place when it pulls the occupancy permits for each unit in the new buildings. There are a total of 88 units being constructed in the three buildings.
Stanford was concerned that eliminating the fees would “leave money on the table” that the village would need for improvements because of the development.
Village President Randy Timms said one of the reasons the village hired Smith to look at the fees was because Teronomy had asked for a waiver of some of the impact fees after calculating it would cost Teronomy about $304,000 in impact fees for the three apartment buildings.
Trustee Ann Zess said she understood both sides of the issue, but would be more in favor of doing away with the fees to encourage development.
Trustees Fred Douglas and Forty Renucci also expressed concerns about not having the money needed in the future to fund improvements but didn’t want to discourage development in the village with those fees either.
“Impact fees are necessary,” Trustee Scott Seager said and wanted more information as to where East Troy’s impact fees were in comparison to the communities in the immediate vicinity.
Timms even asked resident Mary Nicoson, who was at the meeting, what her opinion was. She said it was a tough call because development should be encouraged but not at the expense of services in the village. She wondered aloud if it was the impact fees that were preventing growth in East Troy.
The board asked Suhm to gather information about impact fees in the communities surrounding East Troy so they could take up the issue at a Committee of the Whole meeting.
