City Council - workshop

Good evening. The workshop council meeting for the City of Copper Cove held August 4th, 2026. It's called to order at 5 p.m. Madam Secretary, please call the roll.

Mayor Yancey.

Here.

Christina Strophos. Here. Rita Hogan. Here. Howard Hawk.

Here.

John Hale.

Here.

Del Treadway.

Here.

Vanya Hart. Here. Jack Smith.

Here. All right, we've got a full house. We move to item C, announcements.

None for me, Mr. Mayor. None for me, sir.

No, Mr. Mayor. Ryan?

Yes, sir. I have a few. So City Council Places 6 and 7 are up for election this November. And the filing for those few positions is currently open. And deadline to file is August 17th of 2026. This Thursday, August 6th, at the Civic Center from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. is a free fan giveaway. So 37 fans have been donated by the Rotary Club of Coppers Cove and the United Way of Central Texas and will be distributed by the Coppers Cove Fire Department, again, at the Civic Center from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. or until supplies are exhausted. This Friday on August 7th, at City Park Pool is a dive-in movie beginning at 7.30 p.m. or at sunset, and the movie is Luca. Saturday, August 8th, is a adaptive Splish Splash Water Bash at Field 5 Pavilion from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and that is for our adaptive program. August 12th at 10 a.m. or 5 p.m. is a food handlers course. You can go online and register, or excuse me, you can contact our code compliance department, and register for that food handlers course. And then just a reminder that CCISD classes start on August 17th, just a couple of weeks from now. And then August 22nd is the fifth annual Negrete Firefighter Foundation fundraiser, which will be held at Texas A&M Central Texas. Thank you.

Thank you, Brian. I have nothing, sir. Nothing, sir.

No announcements.

No announcements. All right. We move to Item D, Public Recognition.

Item 1, Proclamation, Stormwater Pollution Awareness Week. Dandy Yancey, Mayor.

City of Coppers Cove proclamation. Whereas polluted water discharged into creeks, rivers, and lakes can result in the death of fish, the destruction of wildlife habitats, a loss in aesthetic value, and contamination of drinking water sources and recreational waterways that can threaten public health, and whereas the Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits the discharge of any pollutant into or adjacent to waters of the United States unless authorized by the Environmental Protective Agency through the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Whereas major source of pollutants into the waters of the United States is polluted urban and suburban stormwater runoff and whereas the most common sources of urban and suburban stormwater pollution our household hazardous chemicals yard and pet waste automotive chemicals trash and silt and whereas it is imperative that pollutants be prevented from entering into the stormwater runoff within and adjacent to the City of Copperas Cove to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. Now therefore, I, Dan Yancy, Mayor of City of Copperas Cove, do hereby proclaim the week of August 17th through 21st, 2026 as Stormwater Awareness Month. Stormwater Pollution Awareness Week in the City of Copper's Cove and let it be known that the City Council of the City of Copper's Cove urges all citizens of this city to make efforts to reduce stormwater pollution.

Usually I come up here and I accept these proclamations as I'm over public works and storm water control falls under my department. However, I wanted y'all to have a chance to actually look at the guys that make this happen on a day-to-day basis. Without their day-to-day support, our program wouldn't nearly be where it is and in compliance with TCU regulations. In order to really protect one of the most precious of our resources, the water that returns to the watershed, ultimately makes it down to the lakes and returns to us in the form of potable water. So once again, my stormwater management crew, John Field, their lead, and we have Caleb out here with his daughter. He's a big part of that, too. So thank you very much.

All right, we move to item E, workshop items.

Item one, impact fees 101 presentation by Ben Plett, PE, PTO, Kimley, Horn & Associates, Inc., Bobby Lewis, Development Services Director.

Thank you, Lisa. Mayor and Council, on March 3rd, 2026, City Council adopted Resolution 26-9, 2026-9, establishing the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee to review and make recommendations for implementation of water, and roadway impact fees. On July 20th, 2026, Kimley Horne made an impact fee presentation to members of the Capital Improvements Advisory Committee for education and discussion purposes. Now I'll bring up Ben Pleat. He's from Kimley Horne and his staff. He will make a presentation, Impact Fees 101, presentation to city council.

All right, good evening, everyone, mayor, council. My name is Ben Platt. I work for Kimalee Horn. And I'm the project manager on the roadway impact fee and the water impact fee update. My particular expertise is actually in the roadway impact fee section. But I also have Sierra Feller here, who's kind of leading the water part of that. It's two different disciplines within. And we also have Emma Brockman here, too, who has helped me with the roadway impact fee. And we'll kind of run through it. Yeah, so today we're really just talking about education and discussion and what council's role is as relates to the roadway and the water impact fee here. So not adopting anything, no ordinance or anything. We're just kind of here to talk and give kind of a brief overview. If you have questions, please stop us. Happy to jump into any section that's interesting to you all. And we'll have plenty of time at the end for questions as well. Okay, so jump right into it. So what are impact fees? Most simple terms, it's a one-time fee for new development. The purpose is to recover infrastructure costs required to serve future development, right? So the fee is... only to serve the water you need or the vehicle miles of capacity on roadways you need in the future. And of course it's a legal way to collect a flexible fee, so one of the big advantages of it is you can take many developments dollars and put it towards one large improvement that actually helps them rather than making small one-off improvements to the existing infrastructure. More about what they are and what can be used with, is recoverable by impact fees and what isn't. First and foremost, construction cost of capital improvement roadways or water lines that is on the impact fee plan. You can't just build a roadway or build a water line though. You have to have surveying engineering fees You have to have planning fees to know where those are gonna go Many land acquisition costs also count towards that and then actually debt service would also count Towards projects that still have capacity to give to the future roadway or water network So I think of it as anything that is capacity adding is eligible to receive roadway or water impact fees on what can't be is obviously the next step here to think about. Anything that's not shown in the roadway impact fee or the water impact fee CIP is not recoverable, so we need to have that line on the map to put these dollars towards those projects. That's a large part of the studies to develop the RCP, roadway capacity plan, and WCP, water capacity plan. Any repair, operation, or maintenance of existing facilities, that is not eligible. It's only for future roadways upgrades, basically. If you have a roadway that's currently over capacity, that would not be eligible to widen that road. The existing demand already needs that roadway widened. If you widened it, there would not be room for future development, so that would not be eligible. And then the administrative cost of operating the impact fee program. So the planning study to do it is recoverable, but the staff tied to administer the program later on is actually not recoverable by state law. I know recently I know it's I saw I was on the agenda for later on as well as the street maintenance utility and the roadway impact fee and I think if you just look at the names it's kind of like we're charging them twice for the same thing that is not the intent of them the street maintenance utility is an ongoing monthly recurring charge you get that every month to use the roads and that is used for operation and maintenance only applied to existing development and based on how much development there is in the city right now. Whereas roadway impact fees is all about future development. You're only charged them one time and it's based on how much traffic we think is coming in the next 10 years.

I do have a question there. So you do say you're only charging them one time, but as soon as they get here, they'll be paying the street maintenance utility fee. That's correct, yes, yes.

The purpose of that is the roadway impact fee is only charged when the project is developed. That's correct, though. This slide got a little cut off, that's my fault likely. Just going through why cities use impact fees and kind of the advantages of using them. The first thing is they're equitable. No matter if you're the first development on a road or the last development on the road, you'll pay the same impact fee as long as it's within a similar time period. They're predictable. On day one of a development, you can say, I'm going to build 100 single family homes, and you know what your fee is going to be immediately. They're accountable. So by state law, this program actually must be audited, and you must spend the money you collect within 10 years within the service area for the development is as well. And they're mathematically proportional. That's kind of like the state law part of it. So the impact fee is directly tied to how much traffic you're producing or how much water you need. It's directly related mathematically. So now we're gonna jump into a lot of what goes into the study. There's several different components here and we'll touch on each of these things a little bit more. I'm gonna let Emma go ahead and talk about the land use assumptions.

Okay, so the land use assumptions are basically the growth that we expect to see within the next 10 years. This establishes the amount of infrastructure required to serve that new growth. So in order to calculate the amount a development owes, we first need to know how much growth there is expected to be in these next 10 years. It establishes where the growth is happening, how much growth is happening, and what type of development is happening. And one things with these is they're not perfect. We can't predict the future how much people are gonna come here. But it is our best guess and the city did provide us with great data to use and develop the land use assumptions with. So mainly our data sources were historical building permit data for the roadway impact fee and then historical water meter data for the water impact fee. Additionally, with those growth rates that we got from the historical data, we back checked it with things like the street maintenance utility report and then also staff input and then also the KTMPO travel demand model. As Ben mentioned earlier, there are service areas for each of the impact fees, the water and the roadway. And this is because the funds collected within a service area have to be spent within that service area. So for the roadway impact fee, it is bounded by city limits, which is a little different than the water impact fee, which we'll get to in a second. And then there's also a six mile trip length limit. So we established three service areas, but with service area C, we expect no growth in it, so it is a no fee service area. And then for the water impact fee, it is bounded by the CCN, which is the jurisdiction that the utility is provided to. And additional areas that are expected to be added into the CCN are also included. So these are our 10 year growth projections for the roadway impact fee. Another thing to note is that we did get city input and so like in service area B, we are aware of the new VA development that's coming. So we did add that because we were aware of that development coming. Now I'm gonna pass it to Sierra to talk about the water.

All right, so again, Sierra Feller, also Kimley Horn, focused really on the water side of things. And here we're just highlighting how those water growth rates were established. And so it's probably a bit easier to see on your computer there, but we've got the blue triangles, and those are actual demand data or meter data from the last five years. And so we looked at actually how many meters were being set historically and that informed the growth rate that we established for the water utility. So we also compared it to some of the other reports that have been done in the area. So we looked at the 2020 comprehensive plan We also looked at other studies that have been done in the region and landed on a 3.3% growth rate as a reasonable growth rate that's expected for the water utility. And it does align closely with the roadway growth rate as well. So then for the water side, we have one single service area, but we do break it up based on pressure zone. Pressure zone is how we have to determine the requirements based on state code. And so as you can see here, we've got So the first column is your existing, second column is your projected, and then that third column would be the projected new LUEs or land use equivalent that'll be expected in each zone. So as you can tell, there's certain zones where, you know, Rattlesnake and Southwest, if you're aware of those regions where we're predicting more growth versus Mountaintop is a smaller region and we're expecting less growth there. Now I'll dive in a little bit more about the specific service units and how we've defined those. So the service unit for each roadway and water are important to define because it's the base unit that the fee is established around. So for water, we have a living unit equivalent. This is the equivalent use of one single family home. For water, we're expecting 7,691 LUEs to be added over the next 10 years. And then for roadway, it's a little bit different, but really you can think of a vehicle mile similar to an LUE for the roadway side. And then there's the breakdown for service area A and service area B. The roadway service area, it considers two different variables. You've got trip generation and trip length. And so we look at across the service area, you know, how many trips are going to be generated and then how far you have to travel to get to that location. And that's how we establish the roadway service area unit. We also have a sample calculation that we're happy to dive into more. As I said, I'm more on the water side, so if you all want to dive into this, we can pull Ben up to the stand to go over that. For the water side, we really break everything down based on that five-eighths inch meter, which is the standard meter size for a single family home. We go back to America Water Works standards for maximum operating capacity. So this is really established, a national standard that's established for how much a single family home meter can flow. And then we equate that for every other meter sizing up. So for example, a five eighths inch meter, if it's flowing 10 gallons per minute, you scale that up, that makes a two inch meter flowing 80 gallons per minute. And so it really is proportional to the amount of water we expect developments to be using. And with that, we'll pass it back to Ben.

Yeah, and I'll talk a little bit about the roadway capacity plan and the water capacity plan. So this is the, you basically take master planning documents and you segment out the part of it that is needed to serve 10 years of growth. So the roadway capacity plan is based on the transportation master plan. So this plan's already been adopted and we really look at it and just verify, so which of these roads are gonna add future capacity for future development and which aren't. And we take all of the roads that will add future capacity and we add them to our plan. The water capacity plan is actually a little bit different. It looks more at the historical meter setting trends and how much we're going to need in the future. It actually projects a little bit of its own master planning what infrastructure we'll need in the future to serve the expected growth. Moving on to the maximum fee, so this is kind of where it all gets put together as part of our study. So you look at the recoverable cost of the RCP or the WCP, so the total dollar amount to build the capacity-adding components of those plans that's needed in the 10-year window, and you divide that by the total number of new service units that will happen in the 10-year window. So we kinda talked about the land use assumptions, how much growth is coming, and then we talked about the RCP, WCP, how many dollars is needed for the infrastructure to serve them. And then each individual slice of the growth gets their own dollar amount associated with their growth. So you'll have a dollar amount per LUE and a dollar amount per vehicle mile. We do have draft max fees here. These will change. We are currently in the middle of doing financial assessment of the program to account for things like ad valorem tax and then as well as future dollar costs and everything to construct in the future. First things that's already been constructed and everything. They can go up or down based on that assessment. It will be somewhat marginally, generally 10% or less that they'll move. So this is kind of the order of magnitude that the draft maximum fee will be. I should say that this is kind of setting council's ceiling for what they could assess. Many cities adopt a collection rate that is below the max, but you couldn't, for instance, say the service area A, maximum accessible fee, you can't say it's 3,000. You could say it's 2,000, but it can't be above the 2792 there. I know these are just numbers. They probably don't mean a ton until we compare to our neighbors, which I think is important to do. So we have a few slides just showing what other communities kind of in central and south Texas are looking at right now. We got some feedback from CIAC about showing a map just who is collecting impact fees and who isn't for roadway and water. So that's what this map is here. You can see that kind of Waco College Station in the Austin area, especially the northern suburbs, do have roadway impact fees. And then kind of the Copper Scope, Colleen, Harker Heights, Belton Temple, that area, there are no current roadway impact fees. Colleen did go through with a study, I believe in 2021, but the study was never formally adopted. So they did a full study, but they don't currently charge roadway impact fees. So comparing some of those in blue that we're seeing here, this is kind of how the roadway impact fees stack up here. So as you can see, none of these communities have actually adopted the maximum assessable fee. So the Copper's Cove graph is showing the maximum assessable fee in dark blue, but then the light blue is the maximum assessable for other communities, and then the slightly darker blue than that is actually what they're collecting here. I personally completed the Georgetown and the Leander roadway impact fees, so a lot of the times the newer roadway impact fees are a little higher, but the Copper Scope ones are lower than both of those are. This is the fee that a single family home would pay here, so this is per development unit. We can always come back if we're interested in that slide more. And this is the fee that a shopping center would pay in roadway impact fees. Mr. Mayor, can I ask a question?

Yeah. Okay. I think you, is it just simplified saying shopping center? Is that any commercial development, for instance? Or is it just shopping centers?

It's just shopping centers. So we use the ITE land code. So there's... couple hundred of them so like shopping center I think there's special like strip retail is one less than 40,000 square feet and then 40,000 to 150,000 would get a different code they'd be pretty similar though like small retail would be different than large retail though okay well I'm asking like if distribution center decided to come here are they going to be paying the eight thousand dollars per thousand square foot It would for a distribution center it likely be less than a shopping center But it is a completely different code considering they all have different trip lengths and then also different trip generation So they would pay a different amount Okay, thank you Another thing to note from this graph is many of these cities elected to do a different collection rate for shopping center They did for residential Sometimes that's common.

Sometimes it's not

I do wanna point out that council can pick on, not pick on any land use they want. So as an example, in Georgetown, they're getting a lot of warehouses in the city limits and they immediately charge them 100% of the maximum assessable fee to discourage warehousing. I don't know if they didn't say it that way, but it's an option council has. I think the most common in the area is to charge a collection rate for residential and a different collection rate for commercial, but that doesn't necessarily have to be done. I just point out the examples so you know the options that you have.

Thank you.

We also have the water impact fee comparison here. So it's largely the same story here with the exception of Killeen does have water impact fees and wastewater impact fees. Ooh, this graph did not print well. Sorry about that. This one's a little more one-to-one comparison, because one LUE is one single family home, so this is how it compares. So I'll try to read some. but it's around 3,000 here. Colleen is a little over 1,000. West Bell County has something similar that Sierra can describe if needed, but they charge around 3,000 for a single family home. Gerald, it's around 6,000 for a single family home. Leander is one of the highest in the region with a little under 8,000 per single family home. We talked about collection rate for roadway. I guess I can talk about it here as well. I'd say for water, it's more common to charge just the maximum, but you have the same option with water. You could charge a percentage of it. It's also an option with the collection rate. You can ramp it up over time or some cities say, we won't charge anything for a year while developers get used to the program and then charge after a year. So happy to talk more about those options or come meet with y'all to present those. I'm happy to jump back to any of the slides we have, but just kind of the general timeline so y'all are prepared for this. We did meet with CIAC about two weeks ago. We're meeting with y'all today on August 4th, and then we'll start bringing this through for first readings and things like that in the fall, this fall. This will go back to CIAC as well. The CIC's responsibility is to make written comments to you all about the study in general.

Excuse me, I'm sorry. Can you, sorry, Mr. Mayor, may I? Can you, what is CIC, can you?

It's the Capital Improvement Advisory Committee.

Thank you. Yeah.

It's newly established. It's actually required by the state law that governs this. It's required for this program, but they do more than manage just this program. They advise on any capital improvement projects.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, I just got a couple questions. Hey, sir, do you know by chance, does Gatesville or Lampasas have impact fees? I don't believe so. Okay, and my second question is I know when you get your numbers from the different entities and put the study together with the formula and come out with a fee, do y'all take in consideration along with what the state puts these unfunded mandates on us and gives us no funding that might reference roads or water and also including the fees that they might periodically raise every other year for permits and things?

There's no state mandated funding considered in this program.

Council, any other questions?

Did you have a comment? Okay. All right.

I can land on the last slide, but that was the last slide.

All right. I think we're. Great. Thank you all so much. We're sufficiently confused at this point. There's a lot there. Thank you. That's the only item for the workshop, so the time is 5.30. We will adjourn, and the regular meeting will begin at 6 o'clock.