CRESTVIEW — The City Council has unanimously agreed to extend the city’s traffic fee waiver four months to allow a required traffic study to be completed.
But City Councilman Bill Cox said that’s enough.
“That's going to be three years and four months,” Cox said. “I can't agree to extending them any longer than that. If you put something on sale without any kind of deadline, the mindset is ‘You can always buy something on sale.’”
The fees — which, until waived to stimulate development during the recent recession, put more than $600,000 into the city’s roads coffers — have not been collected for three years.
If the council allowed the waiver to expire, on Jan. 1 the city could resume collecting the fees, which help compensate for additional traffic development contributes to local roads.
Whether fees are waived or not, Growth Management Director Teresa Gaillard said, by law, the traffic study must be performed anyway. If the city chooses to do away with the impact fee entirely, it then needs to revise the comprehensive plan, Gaillard said.
Public Works Director Wayne Steele supports the fee because it helps compensate the city for extra traffic on its roads. Right now, he said, the section of State Road 85 by Wal-Mart is beyond its designed capacity and can’t support further development.
“The (Florida Department of Transportation) can actually deny any access to Highway 85 (for new development) because we'd be in violation of our ordinance,” Steele said at Monday evening’s City Council meeting. “They would say we have to make improvements before they allow us to add any new development that will add more trips to 85.”
Councilman Doug Faircloth said he favored reinstating the fee, but with a slight change.
“I would move we change the name of the impact fees, and there's a reason. There are some businesses that want to come to the city and they don't want to have to pay a traffic impact fee,” he said.
“I would propose we call them infrastructure maintenance and construction fees.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Crestview City Council extends impact fee waiver