Kane County commissioners on Tuesday adopted the county’s first formula for assessing developers a fee for helping to improve roads.
The ordinance establishing the fees on all new residential and commercial development in the county mirrors one adopted by DuPage County several years ago and that has successfully weathered several court tests since. The formula, which puts a dollar value on traffic volume and its impact on a given area, is set to take effect April 1.
The mayors of Batavia, St. Charles and Geneva said the fees are inequitable and unfair to developers in their towns and vowed to lead an effort to alter the ordinance. Batavia Mayor Jeff Schielke said the municipalities will use whatever legal options they have.
Based on the way the fees are to be calculated, Schielke said a large commercial development in some of Batavia’s border areas would be assessed fees totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars greater than if the same development was planned a hundred feet away, in an adjacent town.
Schielke, St. Charles Mayor Susan Klinkhamer and Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns said they support the concept of impact fees rather than increased property taxes, for example, but they take exception to what Schielke said was a fee formula that “creates a number of large disparities and, we feel, inequities … for the Tri-Cities.”
Schielke said the county’s formula fails to give the towns credit or take into account the significant impacts county-owned facilities and other large government institutions already have on the county roads within their borders.
“We feel [the ordinance] is not in the interest of fairness and parity to the Tri-Cities,” he said.
Other municipal officials argued that the impact formula, as adopted, provided a disincentive to redevelop property and would encourage the type of sprawl Kane County’s much-heralded comprehensive land-use plans aims to discourage.
The St. Charles City Council adopted a resolution Monday opposing the county impact fee ordinance.
“Nobody is opposed to impact fees,” said Klinkhamer, repeating a refrain that nearly every County Board member who voted against the measure used to preface remarks in opposition to the plan.
“We feel the county needs a transportation impact fee. We feel, however, that the fee formula … is not going to be one that is going to be easily imposed. Because of the impacts on us, this is something we cannot easily dismiss.”
Despite lengthy debate and several attempts to amend or delay their adoption, the Kane board voted 18-7 to adopt the fee ordinance and 19-7 to adopt a companion ordinance establishing a road improvement plan directing where the new fees are to be used.
Establishment of the impact fees has been brewing in Kane for more than two years.
Because of strict statutory guidelines for how impact fees are to be enacted, the Kane board virtually was bound to vote on the ordinances as presented Tuesday or, if amended, face having to restart an approval process that could take another year to complete.
County Board Chairman Mike McCoy (R-Aurora), who advocated heavily for imposing impact fees in lieu of raising fuel or property taxes, said he expected they would not be embraced by developers or by politicians concerned about their standing in the development community.
“We geared this for the citizens,” McCoy said. “As a citizen, I’d like to live in an area where the impact fees [on developers] are the highest. The way I saw it was the [citizens in the] Tri-Cities are getting the most benefit from it.”
McCoy said the $3 million the ordinance is projected to generate in its first year accounts for about 8 percent of the annual costs of the improvements planned for county roads.
