City to contemplate impact fee hike

Concord City Hall Catherine McLaughlin—Monitor staff
Published: 06-16-2025 5:03 PM |
Concord leaders are considering charging new businesses and residents more for their added demand on city infrastructure after more than a decade of holding those fees flat.
For years, Concord has opted only to charge impact fees on residential projects and only to cover certain services. Some city councilors want that to change: They want to charge more to commercial and residential newcomers, relying less on tax and water bills to pay for upgrades to a growing city.
Other city leaders worry that raising fees will scare off commercial projects that would grow the tax base and will drive up the cost of new housing units.
Ward 10 Councilor Jeff Foote has been pushing for Concord to up its impact fees throughout his first term. If Concord did that, he said in the heat of recent budget deliberations last week, “we wouldn’t be scratching for nickels and dimes.”
Foote and other councilors on Monday endorsed the formation of a committee that will weigh not only how much Concord charges in impact fees, which haven’t been changed since 2014, but also what types of development and services would be charged.
Currently for new commercial or housing projects, including newly built individual homes, the city is allowed to charge impact fees to help cover the costs of changes to infrastructure, such as parks, schools or roads, to accommodate the influx of new people and industry.
Impact fees can only be charged for expansions to infrastructure needed to support the new development. They can’t be used for regular operating costs or to fix existing infrastructure, and they must be spent within a few years of collecting them.
For example, if the city didn’t have enough firefighting capacity to cover a large new housing or retail project, it could charge impact fees to bolster the cost of adding a new fire station in the neighborhood. It can’t charge impact fees to hire more firefighters or do repairs at an existing station.
Article continues after...
Yesterday's Most Read Articles






Currently, Concord only charges impact fees for recreation and transportation, and only on residential developments. While school impact fees were charged in the past, an aging population means local school systems haven’t had to expand for more students in decades.
Concord currently has fees for commercial development but doesn’t enforce them. In 2017, fearing the capital was at a disadvantage to cities like Manchester and Nashua – which at the time did not charge non-residential projects – the council implemented an automatic waiver for non-residential developments in the hope it would attract commercial growth.
Making apples-to-apples comparisons between cities in New Hampshire can be tricky when it comes to impact fees. There are other levers to pull, like permits, to offset the costs of new development. The companies behind projects can and frequently do negotiate or apply for waivers on impact fees.
Some communities calculate their fees by the square foot and others, like Concord, by the unit, and different places charge for different services. Dover, for example, collects impact fees for fire and police but not for traffic improvements, as Concord does.
Concord hasn’t touched its rates since 2014, although they are reviewed annually. If they were to be increased on par with inflation, it would mean raising them in the neighborhood of 30%, according to a report from the city planning department.
For a single family home, that would bump total impact fees from around $3,200 to $4,100. On a 30-unit apartment project, such as one that recently opened downtown, that jump would mean the developer would pay almost $82,000 in impact fees, compared to around $63,000 currently. Projects with hundreds of proposed units, like the 600 units proposed at the Steeplegate Mall, would face a difference of around $360,000.
To Foote, leveraging impact fees is a more marginal cost to each individual developer or builder but would be a boon to city coffers and a relief to existing taxpayers, especially with things like a new police station, fire station and major wastewater treatment improvements on the horizon.
“Every time a developer or someone wants to build to come to this city, don’t we want them to pay their fair share to be part of this community?” he said Monday. “Every time we waive or negate the impact fee, the burden’s being shifted on the existing taxpayer.”
To others, like At-Large Councilor Nathan Fennessy, Concord isn’t in a place to make bringing a business here or building a home any more expensive because of the housing affordability crisis and the city’s resident-heavy tax base.
While lower fees are a relief to newcomers in the immediate term, he said, they will save other residents money in the long term if the commercial tax base grows and added housing stock brings prices down.
“In increasing impact fees you’re going to make housing more expensive and you’re going to discourage investment by commercial properties in the city,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go down this route at all.”
This divide mirrored views on the planning board.
“To raise the impact fees 25 to 30% seems to me is really sending not a great message to people about who wants to come build here, who wants to come live here,” board member Teresa Rosenberger said during the recent meeting. “Shame on the city for not keeping up with inflation … but I really think the timing and the optics are bad.”
While Concord isn’t growing at exponential rates, it is facing a generational load of capital and infrastructure projects on the horizon including a police station, fire station, field complex, library, wastewater treatment facility and major changes to high-traffic intersections, former city planner Steve Henninger told the board. A boost in impact fee revenue could be a key way to take the pressure off taxpayers and still afford these improvements.
A committee, formed by the mayor, will delve further into whether the city should raise its rates, charge for more types of infrastructure, re-implement commercial fees or some combination of these. Formal changes would eventually have to win City Council approval.
Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.