Developers may have to start paying higher fees for parks and recreation in Franklin.
The Franklin Plan Commission gave a unanimous favorable recommendation to the city council on Dec. 16 to raise the park impact fee from $11.42 to $24.90 per building permit for single-family homes. Apartments and duplexes would pay a $16.19 fee, said Chip Orner, director of parks and recreation.
For approximately the last 25 years, developers pay a park impact fee when pulling a permit to build any dwelling, whether a single-family home or multi-family housing. The fee covers new park development and new infrastructure improvements since additional residents impact parks and recreation, Orner said.
The fee is only charged for new construction and homeowners who remodel would not be charged for it, Orner said.
Income from the fee cannot be used for day-to-day operations, maintenance of existing facilities or staffing. A higher park impact fee would help pay for “fairly large” park projects within the next five to 10 years, Orner said.
These include the Scott Park expansion for youth athletics that will likely start in the fall and take two years to be constructed, the last renovation for the family aquatic center before “it’s just not going to make it anymore,” pickleball courts at Kingsbridge, trails at U.S. 31 with the corridor project led by the Indiana Department of Transportation, and extending the Greenway Trail to the new Winterfield subdivision on Hurricane Road, Orner said.
“Scott Park is a large project. The pool is a large project that we are going to have to figure out how to fund somehow,” Orner said. “Our problem is we can’t have nice facilities and then let them age out and not have them anymore. We’ll all be run out of town if that’s the case. We have to figure out how to do this somehow.”
Parks amenities are an important part of Franklin. The city was an “early leader in greenway development in the state of Indiana,” as one of the first places to have trails. The city already had the existing Greenway Trail in place around 1995, Orner said.
Additionally, home building websites use Franklin park amenities as a selling point, according to Orner’s research.
“They all had how beautiful Franklin parks are, how lucky we are to have the historic Greenway Trail and all of that good stuff, which we know because we all live here,” Orner said, “but as a new resident comes in, that’s a marketing tool that they use, the great park facilities that we have.”
Orner clarified that it doesn’t happen by accident and is because of planning. Park impact fees are a tool to pay for new infrastructure as the population increases, he said.
Over the last five years, city officials haven’t collected a lot from park impact fees, but they have almost collected more within the last six months than they did in four years. This is because two developers are building apartment complexes, Orner said.
“Historically, our park impact fee balance has not been that much because we just haven’t used it as a tool as much as we could have,” Orner said. “So the last five years, most of what you have seen [paid for] in park development has been either city funded or we’ve used bond issues or those kinds of things, but it really hasn’t been a whole lot of park impact fees [that] have gone toward those developments.”
City officials used some park impact fees for the overall $9.8 million project for Youngs Creek Park and the amphitheater, the pickleball courts at Youngs Creek Park, expanding Province Park, and the large shelter at Blue Heron Park, Orner said.
“That shelter at Blue Heron was about $100,000, but that was probably seven, eight years’ worth of park impact fees because we just didn’t have the money to do that kind of stuff,” Orner said. “So that’s why when we start to look at these numbers, you’re going to see that they’re a little bit bigger than they have been in the past.”
Franklin’s proposed $24.90 park impact fee is similar to other communities. Greenwood charges $27.84, while Plainfield charges $25.33, Orner said.
Lynn Gray, plan commission board attorney, reminded the board that this would be a way to fund things in light of legislative changes.
“With SB 1 being passed this year, in fact, that’s one of the things that the legislature has said to local units of government, ‘You need to find other ways to fund things rather than from your general fund,’” she said.
The quality of life amenities are why people move to different communities and why developers build homes in certain communities. That’s why developers “tout them,” Gray said.
“This is a way to maybe get those expenses associated with them to at least get them started without the existing taxpayer having to fund them because we just simply won’t be able to with SB 1 being whatever it is until it gets changed,” Gray said. “You’re not going to be able to do some of these new infrastructure projects without looking at alternative sources of funding.”
Commission chairman Norm Gabehart asked if Franklin charges developers other fees, like a sewer impact fee. Joanna Tennell, the city’s planning director, said developers have asked Franklin officials to look into implementing road impact fees as a more transparent system.
The request will be voted on by the city council. It is scheduled for a first reading on Jan. 5 and a vote on Jan. 21, Orner said.
If approved, the increased fee would go into effect after six months, he added.
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