The city of Fulshear will begin collecting impact fees in October 2020.

At its Oct. 15 meeting, Fulshear City Council adopted an ordinance to approve impact fees of $2,500 per service unit for water and $3,250 per service for wastewater.

The process of adopting impact fees has been in the works for one to two years.

“This is a tool the city now has to even incentivize on some levels development and cooperation in the city,” Fulshear Mayor Aaron Groff said.

The intent is for the impact fees to pay for infrastructure related to new development in the next 10 years, and the city must readopt them every five years, said Mike Shelton, senior engineer and planner at Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc., but they can be adjusted should development expand slower or faster than current land-use assumptions.

When will impact fees be implemented?

There are two milestones in the imposition of impact fees on a specific development.

The first is platting and the second is the building permit, which is when the city would collect impact fees, Shelton said.

The city cannot collect fees from existing platted land until Oct. 15, 2020, one year after the ordinance is adopted, he said, and building permits and land platted after Oct. 15, 2020, will automatically receive impact fees.

“Credits can be given towards impact fees as development happens,” Groff said. “If a developer comes to us, they know that this fee is coming in October."

How are impact fees calculated?

Shelton said his firm calculates the maximum assessable impact fees.

Impacts are calculated by taking the tenure capital improvement plan and dividing it by the number of service units calculated in the land-use assumptions and report, he said.

The fee will be based on the size of the meter a developer comes in with, and a developer with a larger meter will pay a larger, relative impact fee.

“If it’s a small meter that serves a single-family home, that’s going to be one unit,” Shelton said. “A larger meter serving a shopping center would serve more and therefore have more use of the water system and wastewater system and therefore a larger impact fee.”

How did impact fees come to be?

Shelton said decades ago, the development community at large wanted impact fees because they ensured transparency on how they were developed and implemented fairly across any development coming into a municipality.