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Secondarily, because any fee increase like this requires unanimous approval by all of the members, it is controlled by whoever wants the lowest increase. We went through this last October, needing a unanimous vote, but the motion failed for the lack of one vote. We voted to support it last year and the hope is that we will still have the support necessary. We are recommending this in support of the rest of the TVTC staff. It is definitely a step in the fight direction. Mayor Pico asked if the nexus is going to show that a higher fee is supportable. Are there individual members saying they will veto any raise in this fee? He said we will never get the improvements to the infrastructure that is needed if we continually fail to take the opportunity to charge the necessary. We will only slip further and further behind. Mr. Brozosky said we keep hearing that the price of housing is too expensive and we keep adding new fees. He thought that a lot of the problems present now are existing problems and it is not fair to make the new people pay for existing problems. If we get enough money to solve this it is going to take all of us contributing, not just the new people. Mayor Pico said one of the ways to finance it was creating a regional fee. It is just that we refuse politically to bite the bullet and charge the fee that is commensurate with the nexus studies that we found new development should be paying. We refuse to do that and maybe we need a change in the political environment that will support a higher fee. Mr. Knowles said originally when the group told us to come up with a fee, the fee was higher. That was voted down. We tried to find a more palatable fee after reviewing every agency's fee increase in the last five years to try to placate some people who did not want any increase. The TVTC staff thinks it is at a place now where at least people can afford it at this level. There seems to be a majority support for an even greater increase. This is a traffic impact fee. This existing fee was based on a study done in 1996 and only looked at development out to 2010, which will be here before you know it. In terms of the total amount of money that is collectable, when you look into the future on projections with housing and commercial development, it seems the time is now to redo this study. The costs are almost double of what they have been. There may be political will in all the jurisdictions to support a larger fee increase with the new nexus study. We are dealing with several different agencies. With the funding schedule as it is now, if we make this interim adjustment we know that if there is not an additional fee increase beyond just the cost of living, we will meet our funding schedule based on the level of funding that the Tri-Valley Council already allocated for these various projects. It will be a question of how much the fees go up, but right now we will have solved a cash flow problem. If we get consensus tomorrow we will have to come back because we will be one of the agencies that have to have an official vote endorsing the fee. The Council is not approving this, we are endorsing Mr. Brozosky's vote on the proposal. It all has to come back before you and every other body involved before this becomes final. Pleasanton City Council 22 03/04/03 Minutes