Ephrata raises construction fees to fund parks

EPHRATA — It’s going to cost a little bit more to build a house in Ephrata.

At a regular meeting Wednesday, the Ephrata City Council voted 5-1 to raise the city’s park fee to $1,800 per residential lot – and will be paid by a developer when a subdivision final plat is submitted for approval by the city – unless the developer sets aside land dedicated for a park in the subdivision.

The new fee is intended to help Ephrata create and maintain new city parks — something nearly all council members agreed the city needs.

However, council member Matt Moore — the lone vote against the fee increase — said he was concerned the city was raising the fee on the wrong people and levying it at the wrong time in the development process, and that would make Ephrata a less attractive place to build.

“I think there’s a pretty strong consensus among the council that we’re trying to improve our funding apparatus for parks,” Moore said. “I’m worried that this is actually a pretty substantial change in opposition to standard practice for how these developments go.”

Moore said he thought it would make more sense to charge the fee when building permits are approved, rather than when developers submit final plans for subdivisions.

“I don’t want to make it where we’re disrupting future residential development,” Moore said. “It’s something that they aren’t going to encounter, in our at least immediate competing communities.”

However, Ephrata’s Community Development Director Dan Leavitt told council members the timing of the fee — during final plat approval — hasn’t changed, and isn’t significantly different from neighboring communities.

“It’s required right now that it’s collected prior to recording on the final plat,” he said.

City attorney Anna Franz also said comparisons with neighboring communities is difficult, given each town in Grant County faces vastly different circumstances, and developers rather than builders are often more knowledgeable about what needs to be done to make a development profitable.

“The more you defer to the individual lot owner, the more opportunity that they’re actually not aware of that until they come in and try to file their building permit, and now they have to pay all these fees. And you will get a lot of complaints about that,” she said.

Franz also said developers frequently have access to financing individual builders do not.

The council’s approval of the new fees means the city is now accepting new subdivision applications. Late last year, the city council approved a moratorium on new subdivision applications as it considered raising the park fee.