Planning staff described a proposed fiscal-sustainability tool intended to analyze the long-term public costs and fiscal productivity of development proposals. Staff said developing the tool would likely require consultant services, both to build the model and to educate city staff and decision makers on how to use it.

Committee members asked whether the model would project costs and revenues over multiple decades and requested that the tool include utility capacity and utility-rate implications (water, wastewater, electricity), infrastructure replacement costs, and environmental costs where they can be monetized (for example, long-term water or energy impacts). Planning staff identified the City of Fate, Texas, and a consulting firm that provides similar tools as references members could review.

Members suggested the tool should be flexible enough to compare development types (for example, single-family suburbs versus higher-density centers or data centers) and to produce an estimated payback or net fiscal position over a long-term horizon. Several members emphasized that results of such a model should inform city decisions and approvals as an additional input rather than serve as an absolute directive.

The committee amended the recommendation resolution language to add utility capacity and utility rates to the fiscal-sustainability evaluation and to ask staff to consider environmental costs and longer-term budgetary outcomes as part of the analysis.