Marble Falls developments get fee relief

Two incoming Marble Falls developments will save money on impact fees following a unanimous vote by the City Council on June 4. 

Developers pay the one-time fees to the city to help finance the construction of necessary public infrastructure such as water and wastewater treatment.

Panther Creek Village, a multifamily housing project with commercial space, and Legacy Crossing, a master-planned subdivision, were each grandfathered into the city’s former, less expensive impact fee schedule by a5-0 vote of the council. Councilors Lauren Haltom and Richard Westerman were absent from the June 4 meeting.

For context, the cost to connect water and wastewater lines to a three-quarter-inch meter, a standard size for a single-family home, was $6,054 based on the city’s 2018 rate schedule. That cost jumped by 100 percent to $12,108 after April 30 following a December 2023 decision to hike Marble Falls impact fees to reflect those in similar-size towns.

Developers of Panther Creek Village and Legacy Crossing will now pay the lower 2018 fees.

“These were cases of mitigating circumstances that were beyond their control,” Mayor Dave Rhodes told DailyTrib.com. “It wasn’t that they were just being irresponsible and taking their time and asking us to give them a break.”

Legacy Crossing’s plans were significantly altered by late-developing issues following an announcement from the Texas Department of Transportation of $80 million of planned upgrades at the U.S. 281-Texas 71 intersection near where the 1,342-home subdivision will be built.

“It changed a whole bunch of things that they wanted to do,” Rhodes said. “They had to redraw it. Not only did they have to redo their site plans, but it changed the infrastructure on top of that. I feel bad for them. They had hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering and soft costs and had to redo it.”

Panther Creek Village, a development of 237 apartment units and 20,000 square-feet of commercial space near Panther Creek Hollow on Corazon Drive south of the 281 bridge, has experienced major lag times in its planning due to a city request that developers build a lift station. 

The station will push septic from the topographically low property up a hill to a sewer line located along the highway. 

“We asked them to upsize it and put it in another spot so that it’s accessible to the other lots that are yet to be developed there,” Rhodes said. “We didn’t want to have to do it all over again. It took a little time to design that.”

Panther Creek Village developers and the city also had to convince neighboring property owners to let them build the station.

“We had to work with two property owners to get an access easement to work on their property,” Rhodes said. “It took a while to work that out.”

He said the lift station and lengthy negotiations were major factors in the council’s June 4 decision.

“Both of those things together took time, which the clock was ticking until April 30 to get all this done so that they didn’t fall into the new impact fee schedule,” Rhodes said. “They were doing things primarily at our request. It didn’t make sense to penalize them for that.”

Rhodes acknowledged that other developments might request similar relief from the new impact fees in the future.

“There will be some that say, ‘Hey, you gave it to them,’ and try to shoehorn something in and pound square pegs into round holes, and they’re more than welcome to do that,” he said. “Unless, they can provide circumstances that were beyond their control that were requests from the city, the state, or unforeseen, they’re going to have a hard time making the case.”

nathan@thepicayune.com