MOSES LAKE — A vote on fire impact fees is unlikely until February at the earliest, after city officials announced at the most recent Moses Lake City Council meeting that an oversight prompted tabling the proposal.

That oversight, characterized at the Jan. 14 council meeting by Interim City Manager Kevin Fuhr as “a glitch,” involved a failure to realize, or announce until that meeting, that a modification of the city’s comprehensive plan was required first.

A fire impact fees program would add fees to building and change-of-use permits for new developments. The collected funds could only be used by the city to mitigate the cost of new fire safety capital improvements, such as fire stations and engines, that serve the new developments.

State law requires that before collecting impact fees, a city must specifically address in its comprehensive plan the facilities that the new revenue would be spent on.

Moses Lake’s debate over initiating fire impact fees goes back decades. In its most recent iteration, the fire impact fee idea has been considered three times since September by the city council. During the six weeks between Nov. 26 and Jan. 14, a fire impact fee subcommittee, consisting of residents and city officials, also met three times, studied the issue and came up with alternatives, Fuhr said. The leading alternative was to propose a sales tax increase, which Mark Fancher, of Coldwell Banker Tomlinson Ranch & Home, said would generate more revenue and be more sustainable and predictable.

Then, with a fire impact fees ordinance on the council’s agenda Jan. 14 – and about 70 citizens attending the meeting – Fuhr announced the need to amend the city’s comprehensive plan.

It is not clear who discovered the comprehensive plan requirement, nor why the discovery was announced only minutes before council members were to vote on the fire impact fees proposal. Council member Karen Liebrecht said in an interview Friday that the subcommittee did not make the realization, and Community Development Director Kris Robbins, who leads the department in charge of the comprehensive plan, was similarly unaware of where the revelation came from.

City Attorney Katherine Kenison did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With the interim city manager on vacation last week and the new, permanent city manager, Allison Williams, not starting until today, little progress has since been made at modifying the city’s comprehensive plan to allow for a vote on the fee, Robbins said.

The city council is not expected to return to the issue of impact fees at its next meeting, which is tonight at 7 p.m.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.