BURLINGTON — A room of developers voiced outrage when the City Council increased traffic impact fees nearly ninefold in April. They said they had no idea a fee increase was coming, much less a jump from about $400 for every car trip generated between 4 and 6 p.m. to $3,834.

So the council and city staff enlisted a group of developers and concerned residents to reevaluate the fee. On Thursday, the City Council will discuss the group’s findings during a special work session before the regular meeting.

“We ended up with a number that was $3,633,” said Burlington Public Works Director Chal Martin, who worked with the Traffic Impact Fee Committee. “The committee met five times, and after each meeting I would try to use ideas that came out of the meeting to revise the project list.”

That list of projects needed to add capacity to Burlington roadways was at the core of the committee’s discussions, because traffic impact fees are supposed to recoup the cost of roadwork necessitated by new development. Pothole filling and other maintenance is not figured into the cost charged to developers.

So the committee tried adding projects, and removing them to see how it changed traffic models and the fee, Martin said. The end result was a fee not much lower than what the committee started with, he said.

“It became clear after about the third meeting that we were coming up with basically the same types of numbers,” he said. “We had about a little over $50 million worth of traffic impact fee project expenses, and we had about $41 million worth of city maintenance and preservation expenses and we could not really change that around that much.”

Martin said he will recommend that the council lower its fee to the $3,633 recommended by the committee, but he personally thinks even the current traffic impact fee is too low. “I absolutely do not think it will cover our expenses. It is too low and significantly too low,” Martin said. “… I think the fee should have been in the $5,500 range to recover that cost.”

However he said too high a fee could be a loss to the city because it could drive away developers. “We are trying to find a balance point,” he said. “… We certainly understand and value private development.”

Developers on the committee could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

Following the traffic impact fee work session, the council is to consider an indemnification agreement with Burlington Hill LLC, a developer that plans to build a three-story condominiums on Burlington Hill. The agreement requires Burlington Hill to hold the city harmless for any complaints or lawsuits stemming from the project.

Martin said the city has faith the condo project will succeed, but added, “regarding the issue of developing on the hill, we just know it is more complicated up there.”

The city recently completed an expensive reconstruction of Hillcrest Drive, a main route up Burlington Hill.

The road was built by a private developer but failed soon after its was completed. The city offered to pay half the cost of repairing the road in hopes of getting repairs done quickly, and without legal action.

The project ended up much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive than the city ever expected, Martin has said. And he said Tuesday that he wished the city had signed an indemnification agreement with the developer who built Hillcrest Drive.

Elliott Wilson can be reached at 360-416-2147 or at ewilson @skagitvalleyherald.com.