[caption id="attachment_142451" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The City of Fredericksburg City Hall building.[/caption]

The Fredericksburg City Council approved a study to help evaluate new projects developed by the city's Planning Commission.

A Capital Impacts Study developed by TischlerBise, a fiscal, economic, and planning consulting firm based in Bethesda, Md., will provide a basis to evaluate cash proffers and conditions for schools and emergency services.

According to the Realtors Association of Richmond website, cash proffers are voluntary home fees on home construction paid by the building firm in the development process and only apply to developments requiring rezoning.

Such fees are used to address impacts created by new developments. Virginia is the only state in the United States that uses this method.

The study uses the place of residence of current students to predict the unit type which would be occupied by students in new housing developments for school impacts.

Using real estate records provided by Fredericksburg, the study also identified the number of bedrooms for each residence's single-family attached and detached units. Those records didn't provide data on the number of bedrooms for multifamily units.

The study used 911 call data to determine the impact on the city's emergency services.

Information provided by Fredericksburg gave examples of how much of a cash proffer could be obtained through this metric. One example was the 60-acre, 375 multifamily unit Neon development project on Gordon Shelton Boulevard. Under the new metric, Fredericksburg could have gained cash proffers of $5.5 million.

The study also measured the impact of those developments on city services. One example found that a three-bedroom single-family home could impact $12,014. The estimate would be $11,239 for public schools and $721 for Fire and Emergency Medical service impacts.

Neon is a development presented to the city's Technical Review Committee by the Silver Company, which is also planning to have its first Neon development in Charlotte, N.C.

The study did go through revisions during its process through the city's Planning Commission. According to city documents, one particular issue was brought up by Charlie Payne, a local land use attorney of the law firm Hirschler-Fleischer. Payne's observations led to the removal of references that would have allowed the study to be used to create conditions for special-use permits, which Payne concluded would have a chilling effect on development in Fredericksburg.

The Virginia code does not explicitly enable cash proffers associated with special-use permit applications, so that language was removed in favor of focusing on the context of rezoning with associated proffers.

The study was originally commissioned by Fredericksburg to TischlerBise but was suspended in 2016. The study resumed in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Virginia General Assembly passed a proffer bill in 2016, which strictly limited any proffer negotiations between localities and developers. Lawmakers revised the bill in 2019 to allow for such talks.

At-Large Councilmember Jon Gerlach would ultimately vote to approve the study because the policy would be reviewed and updated annually. Gerlach voiced his concern that an approach based on this study would potentially harm no-bedroom homes such as studio and junior apartments.

"In the next update, I would like to look at how we could encourage smaller studio, junior, zero bedroom apartments," said Gerlach. "This seems to discourage really small dwellings in multifamily, mixed-use dwellings. I'd like to dig into that at the next iteration."

Ward 3 Councilmember Tim Duffy also approved the study to demonstrate what Fredericksburg would do in these rezoning situations.

"What I really like about this impact study is that it lays out for everybody to see our version of what impacts of development are," said Duffy. "As people come with projects, they can come and look at that, and they can tell us if we're right or wrong, and there can be a negotiation over what impacts are and what proffers could be."

The city council unanimously adopted the study and sent it back down to the Planning Commission, where it will be used to create guidelines for the city's policy regarding cash proffers for rezoning development projects.