University Place hinders its own project
April 8th, 2008 by Republican By DefaultAs usual, the Tacoma News Tribune comes out on the side of tax and spend politicians in University Place with this headline: City cuts traffic fees, but developers still complain.
Toward the bottom of the article the writer states the real issue:
The city continues to struggle to get its Town Center project up and running.
The background:
The council adopted its first traffic impact fee in April, $4,995.
The city reduced the fee to $4,825 in June and dropped it again Monday night.
The council voted 6-0 Monday night to reduce the traffic impact fee about 22 percent, from $4,825 to $3,894 for every vehicle trip a new development creates during busiest traffic hours.
That sounds to me like the city council knows the fee is a mistake and they’re back-peddling to fix their mistake. And of course they’re scaling it back just enough to get the fees coming in without making it too low to squeeze every penny out of businesses that they can.
So what does the city base their high fees on?
“When our intersections reach capacity,” she said, “we can’t have development until we increase that capacity.”
City officials said key intersections will require improvements within six years to keep them from failing – making drivers wait too long to get through.
That’s a strange definition of ‘failing’. It seems to me that ‘failing’ is what the city council is doing by hindering business and their own pet project. I guess they’ll find success any way they can. In this case they’ll save the intersections by preventing growth with stifling fees on developers. They won’t need bigger intersections if no one is around to use them. Smart plan.
Developers view of the issue:
“High impact fees have already damaged economic development in this community,” warned Art Broback, a developer in the city.
Dean Saffle, a local contractor, accused city officials if using high fees to force small developers to underwrite costs of the $250 million Town Center mixed use project.
“You’re trying to do it on the backs of developers,” he said. “It isn’t going to happen.”
Politicians in this area really don’t understand growth. They seem to view it as justification for their pet projects. UP has their Town Center. Tacoma has its Convention Center, Link-to-nothing Light Rail, the failed plan to build a financial district (which now has a name, “International Financial Services Area”, or IFSA) and even hopes for a streetcar line (which failed decades ago when).
When will they learn. And when will the TNT learn to write an article that doesn’t bury the lede.
