Ord 2018-009/amending the Water and Wastewater impact fees to be charged by the City in connection with new land development under Chapter 86, Article 5, Division 4 of the San Marcos City Code and associated land use assumptions

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ic... \! \\ PLU' U 1ER TECHNICAL. MEMORANDUM `,--, 1.\ - -. INC. lilimik .r.„,. :M.vEMrnl E,,... RS'OESIQNEr9S•.,c:C NIisN; City of San Marcos Evaluation of Service Unit Equivalency Project No.: 0600-018-01 Date: March 19, 2014 Prepared For: Laurie Moyer, P.E. Prepared By: Stephen J. Coonan, P.E. TX PE 65516 INTRODUCTION The City of San Marcos (City) owns and operates water and wastewater utilities to provide critical service to customers within its service area. The City is experiencing significant growth within its utility service area. The significant growth in the service area poses a challenge to the City in terms of planning and implementing improvements to add capacity to the utility systems and maintain reliable service to all of its customers. The City has adopted a policy whereby the City looks to the future customers of the system to fund the improvements required to provide service to them. These costs are allocated to future customers through the assessment of an Impact Fee that is collected at the time new customers connect to the system. The City utilizes the concept of Service Unit Equivalents (SUE) to be able to compare the different impacts of widely varying future customers. The City established that one SUE is equal to the anticipated impact from one new single-family residential connection. The methodology to determine the number of SUEs for a given development was recently called into question following the approval of a large multi-family development that included over 700 bedrooms. Using the current methodology, this development was assessed an impact fee based on 50 SUEs. Since the typical single-family residence has three bedrooms, 50 single-family residences would only have 150 bedrooms. This discrepancy raised the concern that the City is under estimating the impact of multi- family developments, and therefore under collecting impact fees from these developments. The City retained Alan Plummer Associates, Inc. to conduct an evaluation of the existing methodology to determine the number of SUEs in a development. This Technical Memorandum presents the results of that evaluation. Texas Registered Engineering Firm F-13 1 of 7 Daus! am soar\share;proiects‘C6i)rn-.8.1111dor.!im-impart gees 3 19.14 docx