Brief History of Traffic Mitigation Fees:

As new additional traffic began to stress county roads, the funds to improve them were not sufficient to cover the impacts. Very little property tax revenue goes into County road funding.  State Highways  (Regional) and County (Local) roads are maintained mostly from gasoline taxes which do not fully cover the costs. Amador County (as other Counties) set up Traffic Mitigation Fees, effective October 25, 1999, to help mitigate the adverse impacts caused by new development and fund the cost of maintaining Regional and Local roads. Even now, with rising costs, the fee amount adopted is still not enough to cover the road improvement expenses completely.

Ordinance No. 1614, Public Road Impact Fee, set a “Base Fee” for a single family dwelling, justified by a Nexus Study and the County’s Capital Improvement Plan. Currently, the base fee is $6,380.00. The fee for commercial developments depends on the amount of traffic the development is estimated to generate over and above the existing volume of traffic.

The fee is imposed on all building permits for single or multi-family residential units and commercial and industrial uses applied for on or after October 15, 1999. It is not imposed on building permits for garages, room additions, decks, remodeling, etc.

Each Traffic Mitigation Fee is put into a Trust and is administered by the Amador County Transportation Commission. It is to be used only to finance construction, improvement, and maintenance of public roads.

Many people ask –“Why do I have to pay the fee if I’m not building my house on a County Maintained Road?” The answer is this – In the course of daily living in Amador County (ie. work, school, shopping, doctor visits, deliveries, visitors to your home, etc.), Regional and/or Local roads will be driven on to get you where you need to go.

Current Traffic Mitigation Fee Schedule effective 10-01-2023.  Traffic Mitigation Fees 10-01-2023 . [pdf]

Full text of current Traffic Impact Fee Ordinance effective May 15, 2005  TMF Ordinance No. 1614 [pdf]

Free viewers are required for some of the attached documents.
They can be downloaded by clicking on the icons below.

Acrobat Reader Windows Media Player Word Viewer Excel Viewer PowerPoint Viewer