City studying infrastructure cost-sharing

The debate over the fair balance of public and private contributions to Columbia’s infrastructure is about to be renewed.
The city is in the early stages of recruiting a taskforce to study infrastructure costs, a subject picked as a top priority by stakeholders participating in the city’s lengthy visioning process.
The visioning implementation report puts the city manager in charge of investigating how the city should fund amenities such as sewers, roads and water connections. Although the effort is still in the preliminary stages, City Manager Bill Watkins said he hopes to have a seven- to nine-member taskforce up and running by May or June.
“What we’re trying to do is find a community-acceptable, equitable way of continuing to fund infrastructure, both expansions, improvements and maintenance,” Watkins said.
The debate about who should pay for infrastructure has subsided somewhat as new construction has all but halted during the recession. But the issue has long been a top priority for many citizens; 35 percent of residents said it was one of the three most important growth issues for the city in a 2007 survey conducted by the Kansas-based ETC Institute.
Watkins suggested the new mayor appoint the taskforce with the advice and consent of City Council and that any new fees be subject to a popular vote.
The question of infrastructure cost-sharing relates to the work of the Comprehensive Plan Task Force. That has piqued the interest of the Planning and Zoning Commission, which had members meet with Watkins and will likely have a commissioner on the new taskforce.
Commissioner David Brodsky said he hopes the new taskforce reviews and updates the city’s existing development fees, and he agreed with the city manager’s proposal to have the mayor appoint the members.
“We see this as an opportunity to outreach to some of the folks in the development and the business community that aren’t, generally speaking, involved with a lot of these kinds of processes,” Brodsky said.
A community taskforce that studies the costs and benefits of development will educate the public on how the city staff already extracts developer contributions to infrastructure, Brodsky said.
“The community hasn’t really had a chance to see that as much as I think they probably should,” he said. “I think if that were brought out into the light, it would go a long way to alleviating some of those conspiracy-theory kind of notions.”
Looking into the net economic costs of development will take a long time and must be data-driven, Watkins said.
Watkins believes the current balance between public and private contributions to the sewer and water system is already pretty equitable. Contributions to roads are also at a reasonable balance in his opinion. The city charges 50 cents per square foot of development, which goes into a road fund. But many of the current roadways are already inadequate, so public contributions are probably necessary in addition to development fees to make the necessary improvements, Watkins said.
A taskforce a few years back studied the road issue in terms of impact and development fees. Some members wanted to put all of the road improvement costs on new development, and Watkins said that would have been a mistake given the current economic conditions.
“We would have had zero money,” he said. “We wouldn’t have done Scott Boulevard. We wouldn’t be doing Mexico Gravel (Road). We wouldn’t be doing half the roads we’re doing now.”
Another area the taskforce has to look at is the stormwater utility, which is still a fledgling operation and is not adequately funded. The stormwater utility just doesn’t have the money to comply with state and federal mandates, Watkins said.
“That’s a piece of the infrastructure taskforce that just isn’t in place, and it’s probably something we don’t want to wait for,” he said.
Don Stamper, executive director of the Central Missouri Development Council, said the discussion about infrastructure contributions is happening all over, and it’s “probably a good one to have.” But he said it’s important to remember that any new fees placed on developers ultimately get passed on to the end user.
“We’ve got to keep our commercial rates competitive; we’ve got to keep our housing costs competitive,” Stamper said. “That’s a balance you have to strike.”