Sean C. Morgan
The city Public Safety Committee will move the concept of a street maintenance fee to the full City Council for discussion during a work session after the first of the year.
Based on a suggestion from a councilor, the Public Safety Committee took a look at examples of similar ordinances from around the state, including Corvallis and Silverton, during a meeting Dec. 13.
A street maintenance fee could help pay for street maintenance projects, providing funds in addition to state gas tax revenue shared with the city.
“It certainly would be useful,” said City Senior Engineering Technician Joe Graybill, who attended the committee meeting to hear about the idea. “Our funds in Sweet Home drop for the obvious reasons. They don’t increase by any means, but they tend to not be very much. I certainly would be an advocate of some kind of fee structure at some point.”
The fees are structured with residences as a baseline and trip generation formulas, generally national standards, are used to calculate fees on commercial and industrial properties, Graybill said. Monthly bills for residents typically run in the $3 to $5 range. Silverton is at $6, and Corvallis is at $1.
“It varies,” he said. “It depends on what you figure into the calculation.”
He noted that some cities charge fees to property owners for street lights and parks as well. They’re typically added to water bills.
Councilor Greg Mahler pointed out the damage caused by heavy trucks, particularly ruts caused by Sweet Home Sanitation trucks as they run their routes.
“They don’t pay anything toward street funds,” Mahler said.
“Nothing against sanitation,” Graybill said. “It’s a necessary thing, but the vehicle use is tough on the streets.”
City Attorney Robert Snyder asked whether the sanitation service would just pass the cost on to its customers.
“You’re exactly right,” Mahler said. “Right back to the citizens, There’s no doubt about that.”
“I don’t even like the storm water fee and never have,” said committee Chairman Dave Trask. “If you’re talking about water running off my property into the street, that does not happen. The only time I get water from my property onto the street is when I’m washing my car.
“I don’t like these fees. I never have and I never will. We have road taxes that should be spent for this very thing, and we spend it all on all this other stuff that goes on in this city. This is one of my pet peeves. I hate it. We get hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in our road tax – and we spend it on wages and benefits and whatever – and we end up with under a hundred thousand dollars every year out of $300,000 or whatever it is. That’s our legislature that did that. They allowed that to happen, and here we are. I hate it.”
These fees and others, such as systems development charges are ways “to try and get around development of an appropriate gas tax because we’re so under-taxed for gas tax usage,” Graybill said. “That’s my personal peeve. It’s another methodology. The gas tax is how streets get paved in Oregon. It hasn’t raised in a long, long time. Some cities do street maintenance. Some cities do SDCs for new development usage. It’s a tough question.”
“If you go back to Measure 97, when amazingly they turned that down, it’s because the legislature does whatever they want with the money. They don’t have any accountability for what they do with the money. I’ll never vote for that. I can tell you that right now. I’ll never ever vote for it.”
Bill Matthews, president-elect of the Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, said a need exists “out there that has to do with commerce, with livability. So if you’re not going to do this, then the question is then what? Or are you going to just leave the problem unsolved?”
“I don’t know the answer to it, and I could be persuaded, but raising people’s taxes is not on my radar,” Trask said.
“I don’t have an answer either,” Mahler said. “I do know sometimes I question where our money goes whether it goes in the right direction. There’s things we can look at. I don’t have an answer either, but I agree with you. We’ve got to figure out something for our roads.”
The problems are substantial, he said. It’s not just ruts, it’s craters in some places.
Following the discussion, Trask and Mahler agreed to send it to a council work session for discussion by the entire group.
Committee member Ryan Underwood was absent.