Council supportive of impact fees bill, have preliminary discussion on fire/EMS fees

Jul. 20--Frederick County Council members were supportive of an update to the county's impact fees ordinance, and pondered whether they should further discuss whether to create impact fees for firefighters, emergency medical services or police.

Council members and staff in the county's division of planning and permitting workshopped a bill introduced by Councilman Jerry Donald (D) on behalf of County Executive Jan Gardner (D) last week.

Impact fees are one-time fees paid by developers countywide to help support growing school and library systems.

Donald said Friday the bill is mostly a tune-up of a bill he and Councilman Steve McKay (R) got passed by the council last year to update the actual impact fees, but it did make some significant changes.

One, he said, is that the bill provides a monetary credit for developers who dedicate land for public school sites. The other is it prevents developers for essentially paying twice for the same impact fees, in case building permits expire and the land is transferred to one developer from another, Donald added.

That latter change came in part due to this opponent during the 2018 election, Kevin Grubb (R). Grubb notified Donald of the issue in the months after Election Day, and Donald, Gardner and county staff felt it was a good part to include in the bill.

Donald, McKay and Councilman Kai Hagen (D) all said in interviews last week they were supportive of those changes in the bill. Gary Hessong, deputy director of the county's division of Planning and Permitting, noted the bill only provides a credit for the land component of the impact fee if land is dedicated.

The county has only been collecting the land component portion of those impact fees since Donald and McKay's bill was passed last year, Hessong added. Those range in the hundreds of dollars depending on the type of development--a small portion of the overall impact fees--he said.

Outside of the bill itself, Donald asked county staff during the council workshop last week whether it was legal to adopt impact fees for fire and rescue services, given the growing demand for those countywide.

Steve Horn, director of the division of planning and permitting, said he had worked in jurisdictions where those fees had existed. Kevin Kinnally, associate director of the Maryland Association of Counties, said three jurisdictions statewide have some variation of impact fees for firefighters, emergency medical services or public safety.

Kinnally said in an email that "Anne Arundel [County] uses a portion of its impact fees for public safety, Prince George's [County] uses a portion of its impact fees for public safety facilities, and Queen Anne's County levies an impact fee to support volunteer fire departments."

Hagen and Hessong said there has been discussion about those types of impact fees in the past, with Hessong adding most of the discussions has been about firefighter and EMS fees.

The issue is complex, Hessong noted, because determining what is "adequate" firefighter and emergency medical services could depend on residential versus non-residential areas, age-restricted versus other types of housing, along with overall response times in each area.

"It's always hard to identify that rational nexus," Hessong said, which indicates a key part of what determines the impact fees.

Horn agreed, noting the county's geography during the workshop.

"It gets pretty subjective and Frederick County is a big county, and a lot of these [fire] companies respond to large geographic areas," Horn said. "It gets to be a pretty complex calculation, but they certainly are out there."

Still, McKay, Hagen and Donald said they were interested in having further conversations about whether those types of fees could be implemented in Frederick County.

For Donald, it's a policy question of whether developers and homeowners should pay for those services in faster-growing areas of the county, versus sharing those costs among all county taxpayers.

"If you look at fire and rescue [and] emergency services, those costs do go up as we expand the housing stock in the county," Donald said.

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