Fire districts look at impact fees for help
Growth brings many concerns for infrastructure, especially emergency services, but could impact fees be the answer?
During a Kootenai County commissioners' meeting Monday, David "Rudy" Rudebaugh — past president of the Idaho State Fire Commissioners' Association and District 4 commissioner for the Timberlake Fire Protection District — said he thinks it might.
In Kootenai County, seven fire districts provide protection and emergency medical response. Due to the natural topography and large overall districts, local fire and safety officials are already pushed to their limits, Anne Wescott with Galena Consulting told the commissioners. Adding a rapid increase in population, Rudebaugh said, only contributes to the problems they're facing.
"As we know, we're experiencing astronomical growth in Kootenai County," Rudebaugh said. "Our fire districts and emergency services, our service levels, and our funds are not keeping up with what we have provided by code and what we're supposed to do."
What the districts need, Wescott pointed out, is trained firefighters, well-located fire stations, and reliable apparatus and equipment. She said that having those items gives a greater likelihood of faster and better response times from dispatch call to arriving at the scene.
"If it takes more than eight minutes to arrive to a structure fire, that's when the flashover begins — where fire moves from one room to the rest of the structure, making it much more difficult to fight and obviously resulting in a higher risk of mortality, higher risk of property loss," Wescott said.
Eight minutes, much less any shorter response time, is already a stretch for Kootenai County's districts that are challenged with widespread, mountainous, lake-filled terrain.
Right now, the districts don't have enough stations, Wescott explained to the commissioners, and many that do exist aren't in the right place to maintain quality service.
To continue supplying proper service levels and keep up with the county's growth, the districts are proposing the idea of fire and emergency service-specific impact fees.
Impact fees are one-time charges attached to building permits and other forms of new development to provide funding for public capital improvements to offset growth's cost effects. The fees are typically based on cost, nature (commercial, residential), and the development's size — intending to have growth pay for itself.
Governments are increasingly using impact fees, Wescott noted. She said she's worked on similar presentations for Ada and Canyon counties.
Fire districts are not allowed per Idaho statute to adopt impact fee ordinances on their own, but counties and cities can enact them to serve the departments.
"At the end of the day, my goal would be for the fire districts in Kootenai County to have a general feeling that you would support and implement the impact fee ordinance on behalf of the fire district because we have no ordinance authority," Rudebaugh said.
Nothing has been set in stone yet, but the commissioners expressed support for the fire commission to look at how impact fees could support their services. If the county did partner with the districts, an advisory committee would be formed to review capital improvement plans and hold public hearings.
"You know everybody talks about growth," Commissioner Chris Fillios said. "I hear a lot of people saying impact fees. Well, here you go. You've got three thumbs-up."