La Vergne, Tennessee

Multi-Facility Impact Fee Study
   

The City of La Vergne, a suburb of Nashville, originally contracted with Duncan Associates to develop road, water and park impact fees in 1997. The city is known as the book and video distribution capitol of the world. At that time it was the fastest growth city in Tennessee. The City already charged a $2,350 per unit “privilege fee” to new single-family water and sewer customers that functioned much like and impact fee, and also required developers to dedicate right-of-way and construct improvements to adjacent substandard roads. The potential road and park fees calculated would have roughly doubled the amount

of those existing fees, and the water impact fee could be increased significantly. The City adopted the updated fees at 50 percent of the maximum fees. In 2004, the City retained Duncan Associates to develop potential fire and police impact fees. An interesting development was the discovery that multi-family units in the city tend to have larger households that single-family units; this was a major change from the 1990 to the 2000 census. Because of this and the “functional population” methodology used to develop the fees, multi-family units had slightly higher fire and police impact fees.