Home builders and industry representatives voiced strong opposition to the city of North Bend’s proposed increase in its traffic impact fee at the Aug. 18 meeting of the North Bend City Council. The proposed fee of $14,146 represents a tripling of the current fee. The public will have another opportunity to discuss the change at the Sept. 1 meeting.

North Bend first implemented a transportation impact fee — a fee per housing unit on new home construction projects, calculated to pay in advance for the effect the new residents and their vehicles will have on city streets — in 2009.

The fee was raised in January, from $700 “per new growth trip” to $4,600 per house, less for apartments and businesses.

Calculations of the fee are complex, involving trip counts, outside funding and growth-related projects on the city’s six-year transportation improvement plan. In the current proposal, plan projects totaled roughly $34 million.

Several builders and an attorney for the Master Builders Association raised legal objections to the new fee, arguing that the city included non-growth projects from the six-year plan and excluded outside funding in its calculations.

However, city staff noted that the fee they recommended was actually the middle ground of the proposals they received from the traffic consultants Fehr & Peers, which were built on work begun in 2013 by Henderson and Young. A lower fee of $11,000 was rejected because it did not include key trip calculations, and the higher, $19,900, did not include “thru-trips” from one spot in the city to another, via Interstate 90.

The public hearing was continued to the Sept. 1 council meeting, and the council is expected to act on the fee change in October, according to the city’s Public Works Director Mark Rigos. He said he has been in contact with the Master Builder’s Association since the Aug. 18 meeting, to discuss their objections to the fee calculation process, and “the goal is in sight.”

Like any impact fee a city can assess, a transportation impact fee requires new growth to pay for its impact to existing infrastructure. Rigos said the new fee will take effect soon after it is adopted by the city council. None of the roughly 900 homes currently in the planning stages within North Bend are likely to be exempt from the new fee.

Exemptions are included for all city projects and significant reductions are written in for businesses in the Downtown Commercial and Neighborhood Business zones of the city.

Other issues raised at the public hearing included Snoqualmie Valley School District’s request for an exemption from the transportation impact fee, and local residents who objected to some of the projects on the city’s six-year transportation improvement plan.

North Bend City Council will meet at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 1, at the Mount Si Senior Center.