At the December work-session, City Manager Wieprecht stated that the city presently does not have a true park impact-fee, although it does have an "in-lieu-of" fee charged to developments who do not wish to preserve open-space as part of their development plans. Developers are charged $1,500 per unit if they wish to pay a fee rather than set aside a portion of the development for open space.

What the city manager proposed at the work session is a true park impact fee, which would be, if adopted, a separate fee which would be unrelated to in-lieu-of open-space charges. Wieprecht said that in recent years the council has discussed the idea of adopting a park impact-fee that every new dwelling would pay, in addition to an in-lieu-of open-space fee.

"When we have a major subdivision in the pipeline, they have the option of dedicating a certain portion of the property – and it has to be usable to some extent … it can’t be steep slopes or things like that, that are unusable," he said. As things presently stand, if a developer does choose to provide open space, the developers tend to select the land to be set aside, which may have absolutely no park attributes.

Thus, he said, even if a developer provides open space, there’s still an impact on the parks. "There’s still people (new development residents) joining recreation programs, little league, football, soccer. Even though the development might provide open space, there is still an impact on the parks," Weiprecht stated.

If the proposal is adopted, the park impact-fee will be assessed in the amount of $1,000 per dwelling unit. If a developer does not wish to provide open space, they would then be compelled to pay both a $1,000 per unit park impact-fee and a $1,500 per unit in lieu-of-open space fee, for a total of $2,500 per unit.

So, he continued, "The idea is really to give us a little more funding to be able to further-develop our existing park network," adding, "We really don’t fall short on having park acreage available. What we fall short of is … sometimes having the money to develop additional sports fields and things like that as new homes come online and generate more demand for those fields."

Mayor Wantz said, if the city should continue on as it has been, "When we go to replace them (parks and equipment) - half the time we need to find some sort of grant to make that happen, because we just don’t have the funds to replace a playground, and a lot of it is because with the growth we have had, we’re just not seeing any fees supporting our park program."