Which comes first: the plan or the money for the plan?

On Tuesday evening, the Issaquah City Council will vote on an updated transportation concurrency plan that was crafted to simplify the city’s work with developers and create new funding sources. Normally, traffic concurrency is a dry and wonkish obligation of the state’s Growth Management Act to ensure cities don’t grow beyond what their infrastructure (primarily roads, but legally including public spaces, schools and fire protection facilities) can handle. With a plan in place, developers apply for new construction, cities determine how they fit into the city’s infrastructure under an established procedure and no one is caught with their pants down 10 years down the line.

But Issaquah staff have projected $304 million in infrastructure costs, largely around the site of the Central Issaquah Plan, through the year 2030. Of those costs, $191 million are unaccounted for, with no attached revenues in the proposed concurrency plan. $119 million of that come from anticipated traffic improvements alone.

That situation has made some members of the city council anxious.

Randy Young, a consultant hired by the city from Henderson Young & Co. of Redmond to assist in the crafting of the bill, said such a funding gap was not out of the norm.

“Is this unusual that a city embarks on this type of exercise?” Councilmember Stacy Goodman asked Young in the midst of a lengthy discussion on the gap at the council’s Jan. 12 work session.

“It’s not very typical, no,” Young said, noting that most Puget Sound cities don’t treat their projected growth as being spoken for.

The spoken for growth in question is assigned to the Central Issaquah Plan, a prominent piece of 2012 legislation concerning the 1,100 acres surrounding the Interstate 90 corridor, from the base of the Highlands and Lake Sammamish State Park to Newport Way and Holly Street. That plan was designed to unify an area of decentralized commercial properties into a planned urban core over 20 years, using land rezones and streamlined permitting and review processes to drive development straight to Issaquah’s gut. Consequently the city’s Development Services department, in crafting the transportation concurrency updates, tailored growth and traffic projections to the city’s great expectations for that area and projected little growth outside of it.

And, consequently, those great expectations became an additional wrinkle in the city’s discussions over transportation concurrency, though such considerations are not a required part of concurrency under the Growth Management Act, as noted by Council President Paul Winterstein.

At the Dec. 8 work session, Young identified new sales taxes, road levies, property tax-funded bonds and local fees on car tabs and business licenses as potential revenue sources that, combined, would more than cover the $191 million. At the time, he noted that those measures could be a difficult sell to the public: voters would need to sign off on the measures that involved local taxes, as well as any car tab fee above $20.

On Jan. 12, Young asserted that citizens would likely act in their own interest as needs became apparent.

“At some point, people become fed up enough with transportation they’re willing to pay for it,” he said.

But Councilmember Joshua Schaer, one of the proponents for addressing the unfunded costs, had a different perspective: “I’m hoping we can address that before they’re fed up.”

A major change to Issaquah’s plan, if approved, is the institution of a manyfold increase on traffic impact fees imposed on new development. For example, a developer building a single-family home currently pays $1,760 in traffic impact fees but would pay $7,904 under the new plan.

The increase rankled some area developers during public input — in one Nov. 19 email to Development Services Deputy Director David Favour, Derek Doke of Kirkland’s Barclay’s Realty wrote, simply, “WOW!!! [sic] That is one way to stop development.”

Questioned regarding the amount of the fees, Young said he did not think they were “artificially low.”

Rather, traffic impact fees can legally, as dictated by the Growth Management Act, only recover the traffic costs reasonably associated with a development project. In road-congested Issaquah, where 70 percent of car trips are people just passing through town according to Development Services Director Charlie Bush, that means those revenues are a drop in the bucket.

“We still have a transportation problem if nobody comes (to new developments in the city),” Councilmember Mary Lou Pauly said. It was a point where she and Schaer were in agreement, though Pauly added that she did not share Schaer’s concerns about the funding gap.

Councilmember Tola Marts likewise asserted it was not an immediate concern: “I don’t think we’re going to go away, pat ourselves on the backs and, four to five years from now, say ‘Hey, didn’t we need to come up with 120 million bucks?’”