City Council to discuss raising impact fees for home builders

El Paso Water Utilities is planning a roughly $30 million project to upgrade a water treatment plant in the Lower Valley. City Council could decide Tuesday how El Paso could pay for its sprawling infrastructure needs.

“If it is new development that is the cause of the need for the new infrastructure, then new development should pay for that infrastructure,” said El Paso Water Utilities Vice President Marcela Navarrete.

Right now developers pay impact fees of 75 percent — the rest shows up on utility bills throughout the city. But Tuesday — Council may discuss whether to make developers pay more.

“What they’re struggling with right now is trying to get to a good balance of making sure the growth pays for itself, while at the same time making sure that they don’t have a terribly adverse impact on the regional economy, and that the economy keeps moving through the impact of construction,” said City Development Director Mathew McElroy.

Impact fees aren’t the answer, said El Paso Association of Builders Vice President Ray Adauto.

“You need to find a different way of being able to do the expansion and the upgrades that they’re talking about without reaching into the pockets again of that new consumer,” Adauto said.

The city expects about 24,000 new residential units citywide in the next 10 years, with about half of those in the Northeast. But Adauto said those numbers are inflated.

“In our opinion, the growth projections are exaggerated in order to maximize the amount of money that they want to collect,” Adauto said.

He said the city’s current population is about 20 percent lower than what the city projected five years ago, when it first introduced impact fees.

“We get the land use assumptions from city planning,” Navarrete said. “I don’t have any doubt they are not manipulating numbers to get any desired result.”

That desired result, some say, is preventing sprawling development in El Paso. But Adauto said impact fees just push homebuilders out to places like Canutillo, Socorro and Horizon City.

“People will drive the extra 10 minutes from those areas into their jobs in El Paso without a thought process,” Adauto said, “if they can save $3,000, which is going to be passed on to them.”