Talk of traffic-impact fees is circulating again.


The Spokane Regional Transportation Council is studying ways to identify and pay for street improvements needed to handle increased traffic generated by new developments. What likely will come out of that effort, SRTCs staff says, is a proposal for a traffic-impact fee system that would apply to all cities in Spokane County and the unincorporated portions of the county.


Its almost inevitable that impact fees will be one of the recommendations, says Ed Hayes, SRTCs transportation planner.


As SRTC gears up for its study, the city of Spokane is going back to the drawing boards with its own traffic-impact fee proposal.


Tom Arnold, the citys director of engineering services, says the city repealed its temporary impact-fee ordinance last fall before any developers ever paid the fees, which would have been a voluntary option in lieu of conducting a traffic-impact study for a proposed development.


Arnold says the temporary ordinance was at odds with the State Environmental Policy Act, so the city has reconvened its stakeholders group, which includes public officials and private developers. He says the city hopes to have a modified impact-fees ordinance drafted by this summer, but might wait for the results of SRTCs study before moving forward with its own proposal.


The SRTCs board, which largely is made up of representatives from Spokane-area cities and Spokane County, earlier this month approved moving ahead with a $108,000 study, which BWR Corp., of Kansas City, Mo., will conduct on SRTCs behalf, Hayes says.


That study will look at uniform ways cities here and Spokane County can comply with transportation concurrency standards stipulated in the states Growth Management Act. In simplified terms, concurrency standards require a city or county to have services, including roads, to handle planned growth.


Currently, cities and the county have different methods of meeting concurrency standards and different requirements of developers as a result, Hayes says.


In general, though, most jurisdictions require a developer to conduct a traffic-impact study to determine whether established and planned streets could support the increased traffic that a development would generate. Those studies typically each cost tens of thousands of dollars, and a new one usually is required for each proposed project, even if the developments are close to one another and multiple studies recently have been performed nearby, he says.


Under the current system, if a traffic study finds that streets can support the additional traffic a development would generate, a developer is able to move forward with a project without having to pay for any improvements to established streets, says Jeff Selle, SRTCs transportation relations manager. If the streets cant support the additional traffic, a developer must pay for all improvements deemed necessary, regardless of how many projects had been approved previously.


In other words, Selle says, the last developer to launch a project in an area has to pay for improvements to support traffic generated by all developments there.


With impact fees, he says, that cost would be more evenly distributed, as each developer would pay fees, and those fees would be collected and put toward improvements needed in an area when they became necessary.


Ideally, Hayes says, a developer would be able to purchase a problem away by paying a fee, rather than by having to fund a study, then pay for any improvements needed as a result of those findings.


The city of Spokanes Arnold says, however, that based on the citys research, its difficult to do away with traffic studies, because they also are required to satisfy another state law, the State Environmental Policy Act.


We were trying to say, Just pay this one fee, and you dont have to do anything else, Arnold says. You cant do that. In our zest, we went a little too far.


Hayes says something else that could come out of the study might be a proposal to divide the Spokane area into small transportation districts, through which impact fees would go directly to fund road improvements in the district.


Selle says one benefit of such districts would be that they could cross jurisdictional bordersa district theoretically might include property thats in both the city of Spokane and city of Spokane Valley, for example.


By studying the area in such detail, the agency also could establish a baseline for what the area has now in terms of transportation infrastructure and what level of impact fees would have to be charged to make improvements needed in the future, Selle says.


Another benefit of such a system, Selle says, is that one city wouldnt be shouldering the cost of street improvements needed because of increased traffic generated by new development in a neighboring city.


Ideally, such a system would be set up so that there would be little wiggle room to game the system, Selle says. In other words, one city wouldnt be able to shift the burden of street improvements onto another one.


SRTC is scheduling a kickoff meeting for its study for early March, and the study is expected to take six months to complete. The agencys board then will take two months to determine whether it will accept the studys recommendations.


Hayes says that for the effort to be successful, SRTC will need Spokane-area cities and the county to buy into the studys findings. Officials from each jurisdiction will be involved in the study, so their concerns could be addressed through the process, thereby giving a better chance of them buying in, he says.


SRTC is a federally designated metropolitan transportation planning agency for Spokane County. The intergovernmental agency works on traffic planning with cities in the county, the county itself, and the Washington state Department of Transportation.


Contact Linn Parish at (509) 344-1266 or via e-mail at linnp@spokanejournal.com.