The Wright City Board of Aldermen held a discussion about potentially assessing road impact fees on developers in the city limits at their Feb. 13 meeting. 

Currently the city has one ordinance for road impact fees, which were assessed specifically on Stuermann Road on the south side of the city. 

“When it was a brand new road, the city put into place a per-permit, additional fee because that road was going to get torn up,” said City Attorney Paul Rost. 

According to previous Record reporting, that ordinance assessed a fee of $500 per home to developers on the road, which provides access to over 250 homes. 

Those fees were collected in a special fund for road improvements and raised roughly $100,000 that was used to cover the costs of repairs to the road. 

Since those repairs were made in 2023, Mayor Michelle Heiliger said conversations about expanding the road impact fees had “went by the wayside.”

As neighborhood and business developments continue to reach Wright City with increasing frequency, those conversations were renewed. 

“We don’t want it by the wayside, but I feel, personally, that a road impact fee should be tied directly to traffic on a road, as opposed to the size of a piece of property,” said Alderman Ramiz Hakim. 

From there the conversation shifted to how the city could logistically assess the impact of construction on any given road. Rost said the city would have to conduct impact studies and Hakim pointed out they would have to do engineering work on any roads that would be impacted to determine how much the cost to repair them would be. 

Rost said the process could be simpler than fully reengineering a road and they could just look into what the expected damage from a development would be. 

“They have these degradation studies they can do that are like, well how much is this going to degrade? How much will it contribute to the road that was supposed to last five to eight years? How much is that going to contribute to shortening that life?” said Rost. 

The board was in agreement that any ordinance or fee structure passed should be geared towards larger neighborhood and commercial developments, and should be written to avoid assessing fees on single homes. 

“It had to be something more impactful, a kind of development, such as a large subdivision or a commercial use,” said Rost. 

He also clarified that any restructured road impact fees would be specifically allocated to road improvements and repairs within the city, and would not be obligated to any other purposes. 

The board did not reach any conclusions at their Feb. 13 meeting but felt that it was a conversation that needed to continue and a measure that could materially benefit their citizens. 

“I think we should revisit the original proposal and get something on the books immediately,” said Hakim. “That’s going to help offset damage from any development in our town.”