Building_development + Forests_green_space

0:00 Thank you so very much. Good afternoon. Welcome to Vancouver City Council. Today is Monday, September 14th, 2026. And we're going to start off with development fee updates. City Manager?

0:27 Thank you, Mayor. This is the first of three workshops that we have scheduled for the council this afternoon, kicking off with some update on where we're sitting with development fees and then moving into a discussion about doing some cleanup and amendments to the Municipal Parking Code and finally an update on where we're heading with our board and commission recruitments for the fall. And so first up, we have Chad Eichen, Steve Wall, and Patrick Quinton. Thank you very much, City Manager. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council. I am Patrick Quinton. I am the Director of Economic Prosperity and Housing. And as the City Manager mentioned, I'm joined by Chad Eichen, who is our Community Development Director, also Steve Wall, our Public Works Director, and Dave Perlick, our Director of Parks and Cultural Services. He got off today, but he's available for questions, and I'm sure you'll have some for Parks. So we want to bring to you what is going to be the first in a series of conversations over the next probably 18 months.

1:27 So we're going to be focusing on a review and potential updates to a range of different development fees. We were beginning work on an update to the first of those traffic impact fees, and we decided that it was better to take a step back and give you a big picture of how we stand now and, like I said, what's coming so that we can think about them in totality, in particular their potential impacts on development. So this is step one. We're going to start by giving you an overview of the current fee structure, impact fees, SDCs, as well as development review fees, what they pay for. And then we'll walk through four different development actual projects turned into generic scenarios and show you how we currently apportion the different fees. And then we're going to switch over to kind of what our current situation is and why it's now time for us.

2:26 And then we're going to review the range of fees and in particular talk about what we have lined up in terms of our capital investment programs across all of our infrastructure areas. And then we're going to do a comparison across jurisdictions, try and give you a sense for how we stack up currently and what potential increases might do to that. Then jump into discussion of impacts on development. You've obviously received a number of presentations from us. On development activity or the lack thereof. And so obviously it's a tough time to be talking about this, but so we do want to kind of begin to talk about how we balance these two different objectives. And then we'll finish off with potential ways that we can think about if changes are needed implementing these over a number of years and give you a hypothetical timeline for how we might proceed on that. So with that intro, I'm going to turn it over to Chad Eichen.

3:26 And he'll he'll kick it off. All right. Thanks, Patrick. Good afternoon. Chad Eichen, community development director. We wanted to kick us off with just an overview of all of the types of fees that the city collects on development applications. I'll get into more detail in subsequent slides, but first is impact fees. This is for parks, traffic and schools. These are collected at the time of building permit issuance in the case of schools. CDD, which is my department, calculates and collects the school impact fees, and then these are passed on through to the school district. System development charges or STC's are for impacts to the water and sewer system. Those are collected by CDD prior to a water meter being issued to the developer. The city does not currently charge STC's for stormwater system impacts. Plan review fees is the next category.

4:25 These include land use, engineering, fire and building review of development applications. The building plan review fee is based on half of what the building permit fee is. And you can think of these as a fee for service. They're collected at the time of the application being submitted. We currently do not charge a separate fee for water or sewer engineering review permit fees. Next category. So, a fee for service, these are to authorize actual construction work, including grading, building and construction in the right-of-way. The fee is collected at the time of permit issuance. The building permit fee, in this case, covers the cost to inspect the building. And then we have inspection fees, which are essentially construction inspection fees. They're collected at the time of permit issuance, and they cover inspection work that occurs in the public right-of-way.

5:25 Then we have state fees. These are really minor. State attaches a $6 fee to single-family homes and $25 fee on commercial building permits. So, not really substantial. A little more detail on impact fees and SDCs. Impact fees were authorized under the Growth Management Act in the mid-'90s. Three purpose statements in that act around impact fees, one is to ensure that adequate facilities are available to serve new growth and development. Secondly, to establish standards for new development to pay a proportionate share of the cost of new facilities needed to serve such growth. And lastly, to ensure that developments do not pay arbitrary or duplicative fees for the same impact.

6:25 Water and sewer SDCs comes from the more general municipal authority and state law, separate from the Growth Management Act. Both impact fees and SDCs cannot be used to pay for existing system deficiencies. Impact fees are based on a projected demand a new project creates and planned capital investments over the next 20 years, whereas SDCs are based on infrastructure already built to serve the development. You can think of those as a -- You can think of those as a payout fee to connect to our system. Parks and transportation fees apply within specific districts to ensure that fees paid will be used on infrastructure that is directly related to the impacts created by the development. And lastly, impact fees and system development charges are placed in restricted funds so they cannot be used for other general purposes. The next category is permit and plan review fees.

7:24 These cover the cost of processing and reviewing all types of development applications, inspecting public and private improvements once completed. Again, these include land use, engineering, fire, and building applications. Plan review and permit fees are periodically reviewed to ensure that cost recovery targets established by city council are being met. This analysis involves staff tracking their time to projects and using an average hourly rate to determine the cost of the project. determine whether the fees are appropriately calibrated proposed fee increases other than annual adjustments based on the regional cpi are brought to city council for approval we wanted to include a few actual development projects and their associated fees so you can start to see how the fees add up and also see how they have or have not changed in the last two

8:21 years so this is this slide is two different projects we have a 198 mixed-use residential