The City Council finds, determines, and declares that:
(A) System expansion required. The protection of the health, safety, and general welfare of the citizens of the city requires that the city’s capital water facilities be expanded, and improved, to accommodate growth, and development, with the city;
(B) System demand. New residential, and non-residential, development imposes increased, and excessive, demands upon the existing system facilities, and often overburdens the existing system facilities; provided, new development is expected to continue, and will place ever-increasing demands on the system to provide these facilities to serve new development;
(C) System revenues. System revenues generated from new development often does not generate sufficient funds to provide the necessary capital water facilities to accommodate new development; therefore, the creation of an equitable local water impact fee system would enable the city to impose a proportionate share of the costs of the needed improvements to system capital facilities to accommodate new development;
(D) Study conducted. In order to implement an equitable local impact fee system, the city caused to be prepared a Water and Wastewater Capital Plan and Impact Fee Analysis, hereinafter termed “study”. Said study is incorporated herein by reference, and sets forth reasonable methodologies, and analysis, for determining the impacts of various types of development on the city’s system capital facilities, and for determining the costs of acquiring the improvements necessary to meet the demands for such services created by new development;
(E) Standards established. The city hereby establishes as city standards the assumptions, and level of service standards, in the study as part of its current plans for future expansions to the city’s system capital facilities;
(F) Impact fee use limited. The impact fees described in this subchapter are based on the study, and do not exceed the costs of improvements to serve new development that will pay the impact fees, nor shall fees be used to correct existing deficiencies for these capital facilities, or to replace, or rehabilitate, existing improvements. This is intended to be a local improvement impact fee (for in-city facilities/improvements that meet in-city demands) as to water;
(G) Benefit. Those in-city capital water facilities/improvements listed in the study will benefit all new development that depends on city services, and it is therefore appropriate to treat the entire system as a single service area for purposes of calculating, collecting, and spending the local government impact fees as to water;
(H) Impact fee relationship. There is both a rational nexus and rough proportionality between the development impacts created by each type of development covered by this subchapter, and the impact fees that such development will be required to pay for water; and
(I) Impact fee purpose. This subchapter creates a system by which water impact fees paid by new development will be used to finance, defray, or reimburse all, or a portion, of the costs incurred by the city to construct improvements for the system’s capital water facilities in ways that benefit the development that paid each fee within a reasonable period of time after the fee is paid.
(Ord. 2019-13, passed 7-22-2019)