Lakewood, Colorado - City Development Fees

Fee Summary

Parkland and School Land Dedication (Impact Fees)

Colorado authorizes local development impact fees under C.R.S. Section 29-20-104.5. Lakewood does not levy a Fort Collins-style per-square-foot Capital Expansion Fee. Its impact-fee-family charges are two land-dedication exactions in the current Lakewood Municipal Code, each satisfiable by land dedication or a fee-in-lieu / cash-in-lieu payment.

Park and Open Space Dedication (Muni Code Ch. 14.16 - Ord. O-2025-7, adopted February 24, 2025)

• Operating dedication standard: 5.5 acres of park area per 1,000 anticipated population (community and neighborhood parks). The nominal standard is 10.5 acres per 1,000 (5 regional + 3 community + 2.5 neighborhood), but City Council found regional-park needs already satisfied by existing regional facilities, so the 5.5-acre community-plus-neighborhood standard applies.
• Population factors: Single-Family Detached 2.55 persons per unit; Multi-Family Attached 1.68 persons per unit (additional unit-type factors apply).
• Satisfied by land dedication, fee-in-lieu, improvement-in-lieu, or a combination, at the discretion of the Director of Community Resources. Accessory dwelling units are exempt.
• The fee-in-lieu per-acre amount is set by City Council resolution on an annual basis (based on market appraisals and market-condition surveys); the amount in effect at the time of formal project submittal applies. Improvements-in-lieu must be of equal or greater value than the fee.

School Land Dedication (Muni Code Ch. 14.17 - Ord. O-2019-24; O-97-5)

• Land standard: 4 acres of land per 1,000 additional population generated by the subdivision or multi-family development.
• Population density factors: Single-family detached 3.25; Single-family attached 2.50; Multi-family 2.00 persons per dwelling unit. Residential health-care facilities and multi-family retirement dwelling units are exempt.
• The City Manager, in consultation with Jefferson County School District R-1, decides land dedication versus cash-in-lieu. Cash-in-lieu is computed per the School District's adopted methodology (school-population and facility construction-cost nexus); there is no fixed dollar table.

Authority: City of Lakewood (Community Resources; Sustainability and Community Development), Municipal Code Title 14.

Planning and Zoning Application Fees

Source: City of Lakewood Planning Fees (Sustainability and Community Development), captured verbatim from the live official canonical Planning Fees page. Building permit fees (valuation-based, plus a 3 percent use tax on 50 percent of valuation) are a separate Public Works schedule and are outside the scope of this page.

Authority: City of Lakewood - Sustainability and Community Development (planning application fees).

Water Utility Tap Fees

Source: City of Lakewood Water Utility Tap Fee Schedule (Public Works / Engineering Division), effective January 1, 2026. These fees apply only within the City of Lakewood Water Utility service area and are charged in addition to Denver Water System Development Fees. Other areas of Lakewood are served by Denver Water, Consolidated Mutual Water Company, and various water and sanitation districts that administer their own connection charges outside the City.

Water Tap Fees (City of Lakewood Water Utility, one-time, by tap size)

Authority: City of Lakewood Water Utility (tap fees within the City service area). Denver Water System Development Fees are separate and administered by Denver Water.

Coverage Notes - What This Page Does Not Cover

Per ZoneFee's Partial-Verified Publication Standard, the items below were not closed on this page with a fixed fee amount traceable to a dated or byte-stable official source document. They are disclosed here rather than estimated, paraphrased from a non-official source, or omitted silently. These items remain under limited-coverage review until these gaps are closed.

Parkland fee-in-lieu per-acre dollar amount

The Park and Open Space Dedication fee-in-lieu is a per-acre dollar amount set by City Council resolution on an annual basis, based on market appraisals. It is not a fixed figure printed in the code, and the amount in effect at the time of formal project submittal applies. This page presents the dedication standard and the fee-in-lieu mechanism rather than a specific dollar-per-acre figure; confirm the current City Council resolution amount with the City of Lakewood before relying on a dollar value.

School land cash-in-lieu

The School Land Dedication cash-in-lieu is formula-based, computed under the Jefferson County R-1 School District's adopted methodology (school population and facility construction-cost nexus) rather than a fixed table. It is presented here as a formula, not a fixed dollar figure.

Planning fee effective date

The live City of Lakewood Planning Fees page is a present-tense canonical fee page that prints no effective or revised date stamp. The amounts on this page reflect the current published schedule; the effective date is left unstated rather than inferred.

Source hash

The City of Lakewood website (Granicus / OpenCities CMS) requires a real browser to render HTML pages and to fetch PDF assets. The Planning Fees page is JavaScript-rendered HTML (a content-text hash was captured, not a byte-stable PDF hash). The Water Utility Tap Fee Schedule is a byte-stable PDF with a SHA-256 content hash. The parkland dedication chapter (Ch. 14.16) was captured with a section-text hash; the School Land Dedication chapter (Ch. 14.17) is cited by codified reference. Building-permit fees (valuation-based plus use tax) are a separate Public Works schedule outside the scope of the captured families.

Special District Fees (Metro Districts / CRS Title 32)

Colorado metropolitan districts (Title 32 special districts) are separate quasi-governmental entities that levy landowner mill-levy assessments and district-specific fees; they are not administered by the City of Lakewood and are not a City development fee. Lakewood's Municipal Code Title 14 also contains Special Improvement Districts (Ch. 14.23, a special-assessment financing mechanism) and the Public Improvement Reimbursement Program (Ch. 14.28, a retail-sales-based cost-recovery tool), neither of which is a per-development applicant fee. Closed-search outcome: this fee family is not administered by this jurisdiction.

Proffers

Colorado jurisdictions do not use cash proffers (a Virginia conditional-zoning mechanism under Virginia Code Sections 15.2-2303 and 15.2-2303.4 with no Colorado counterpart). Lakewood recovers growth-related capital needs through parkland and school land dedication (the impact-fee family above), not proffers. Closed-search outcome: this fee family does not apply to this jurisdiction.

Fee Authorities

Sources