The Grantsville City Council approved an amendment to its capital facilities plan Wednesday that will raise the city’s sewer and water impact fees.
Grantsville City Mayor Brent Marshall urged the council to approve the amended capital facilities plan so the city could begin to set aside funds to replace the antiquated cast iron water and sewer mains under Main Street. Marshall told the council the impact fees and other aspects of the project could be adjusted following approval.
“Currently we’re not setting any money aside for that project, which we need to get started on,” he said. “We’re just wasting time by not approving something.”
The Utah Department of Transportation has scheduled a reconstruction of Main Street in Grantsville for 2019 and the city plans to replace the sewer and water lines beneath its main thoroughfare at the same time as the road project, Marshall said during an Aug. 18 work meeting.
The water main replacement project is expected to cost more than $3.5 million.
Grantsville City Councilman Tom Tripp said he was concerned current residents may take on too much of the burden for growth-related capital projects. He said he had reviewed the capital facilities plans in the cities of Herriman and Washington, which looked at the condition of infrastructure before it was upgraded to determine how much growth resulted in the project.
“Every project was looked at individually and one of the categories in each evaluation was deficiency,” Tripp said. “So you could tell this is only a growth project or this is a growth plus upgrade or repair or something else.”
Marshall countered that the advanced age and inconsistent pipe size in the water and sewer mains under Main Street reflected a project that would increase service to existing residents while providing service to new residents.
Under the amended capital facilities plan, the single family residential water impact fee would increase from $2,244.39 to $2,545.23. The sewer impact fee for a newly-constructed single family building would increase as well, from $1,916.17 to $3,257.22.
The city’s capital facilities plan attempts to anticipate future infrastructure projects for the next 20 years and determine the total cost of the projects and the proportion of the cost attributed to growth and new development.
The capital facilities plan was last updated in April 2013 and called for $16.8 million in culinary water-related projects and $7.3 million in wastewater-related projects. Those figures would be revised to $17.9 million for culinary water projects and $16.2 million in wastewater projects, according to changes proposed by Craig Neeley, who provides engineering services for Grantsville City.
A percentage of those costs are then set aside to be covered by impact fees from new development in the city based on how much of the project is caused by growth. The cost of the project covered by impact fees varies from a low of 11 percent to as high as 89 percent.