The Dublin City Council met this past Tuesday and voted unanimously to decrease the fees that developers pay to acquire land, construct roads, and make other improvements to minimize traffic impacts in east Dublin. The previous impact fee schedule was established in 2004 and needed to be updated to reflect the drastically lower cost of land, changes in land use (i.e., higher density than expected), and higher construction costs. With this approval, the traffic impact fees for residential projects will decrease by a combined 11% and non-residential fees will decrease by 3% effective June 7th. This should help to encourage development in Dublin.
The calculation of impact fees is based on the estimated number of “trips” generated by building new projects (e.g., trips to the grocery store, trips to/from home). The most significant reason for the decrease in fees is that Dublin has built at a higher density than what was initially forecast. Higher density means more people will be generating more car trips. With fixed traffic costs and more people than expected, the cost per “trip” has been less than expected.
In addition to a 24% decrease in traffic impact fees for residential development near the east Dublin BART station, the developers for Avalon and Metropolitan lobbied hard for additional fee reductions based on their argument that there is less traffic on a per-person basis in transit centers because more people walk and take BART. No data was provided to support this assertion.
When it became apparent that the Council would not support an additional fee reduction for Avalon and Metropolitan without having hard data to look at, the Council chambers began to sound like the floor of the British House of Commons as the developers’ representatives began to chuckle and make sounds of disgust off-camera to show their disapproval to the Council.
At the end of their deliberation, the Council directed City Staff to conduct a study to evaluate whether or not further fee reductions are warranted for Avalon and Metropolitan. If further reductions are approved at the transit center, then the remaining developers in east Dublin will need to pay higher traffic impact fees for their projects to make up the difference.
