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Street Maintenance Fee

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What is the Street Maintenance Fee?
The Street Maintenance Fee is a monthly user fee designed specifically for the maintenance of existing roads in Tigard. The fee was recommended to City Council by a Citizen task force, and established through Ordinance No. 03-10 on November 18, 2003. Monthly fee charges for both residential and non-residential customers are billed and collected through the City's bi-monthly utility billing system.

I thought the state Gas Tax paid for street maintenance?
Historically, Tigard roads have been maintained by the state Gas Tax, a source of funding that hasn't risen in 20 years, while road usage, operations and maintenance costs have increased at an overwhelming rate. As a result, Tigard is one of eighteen Oregon cities that have adopted Street Maintenance Fees to close the gap between local needs and increasingly stretched state dollars. By having a locally based fee, communities are provided with a stable source of revenue to pay for preventative maintenance and repairs in a timely and efficient manner.

How are the rates determined?
Existing rates were set in 2004 under Council Resolution 04-12 which was based on a five-year maintenance and reconstruction plan. Both residential and non-residential users pay the fee. Residential users pay $2.18 per month per dwelling unit. Non-residential users pay $0.78 per parking space or fueling pump station. These fees generate $800,000 a year for street maintenance.

For more information, please see the Pavement Major Maintenance Program page.

Downtown
Although many of the downtown businesses do not have sufficient parking spaces off-street to meet the minimum code requirements, the City is providing over a hundred on-street parking spaces throughout most of Main Street to accommodate the businesses. Some of these spaces have time limits to encourage periodic turnover during a typical day. Approximately 60 of those spaces are west of the railroad tracks. These spaces do not include those large parking lots that do exist and are presumably used by patrons of nearby businesses. The consensus in 2003 was that the patrons of the Main Street businesses are parking somewhere to get to the businesses and, as such, the downtown businesses should not be exempted from the charges.

Exceptions
All religious institutions will be charged half of the normal fee assessed to non-residential businesses, resulting in a 100-space maximum for those that reach the 200 space limit. This decision was made because parking requirements for these institutions are relatively high to accommodate large services, while the parking lots are not fully utilized during the week.

In addition, a property must be occupied to be assessed the fee. If a property is unoccupied for 30 days or more, the owner may apply for a fee waiver for that period.

Methodology
The methodologies used by most of the cities in Oregon that have established a street utility fee are based on trip generation rates for the types of uses to distribute the costs. These rates are found in a nationwide publication from the Institute of Transportation Engineers and are compiled through numerous studies. However, the trip generation methodology does not work well for Tigard. This methodology, if used as originally proposed, would have charged the non-residential uses 75% of the costs with Washington Square, Fred Meyer, and other large businesses bearing the brunt of the cost. Most of the traffic generated by these big businesses use state highways, such as Highway 217, 99W and Hall Boulevard. Yet, the fee to be collected is for maintenance of City streets. That methodology was not fair to the big businesses that draw their traffic from regional sources using state routes to get there. Under that methodology, all the businesses, including those downtown, would end up paying much more because the trip generation rates are based on square footage of building.

The City needed to develop a methodology that distributes the costs of maintenance among all the non-residential and residential uses in as fair a manner as possible. No methodology is going to be perfect. The Oregon Grocery Association, in response to a challenge from Councilor Sydney Sherwood to come up with an alternative methodology, suggested the use of the minimum parking requirements of the Tigard Municipal Code. City staff agreed that methodology proposed was much better at distributing costs to the actual users of the City's street network and worked with OGA to flesh out the details. The methodology adopted is one that focuses on the users of the City streets.

The current methodology is based on the following:

Ties the street maintenance element of the fee to a 5-year maintenance and reconstruction plan prepared by the City of Tigard
Uses actual road maintenance and repair projects on City streets, not state or county routes.
Tailors the fee to the local data
Sets a target revenue goal of $800,000 annually (established in 2003)
Allocates the costs of the arterial projects to the non-residential uses
Splits the costs for the collectors on a 50-50 basis with residential and non-residential uses sharing the costs equally. The rationale for splitting the costs in this fashion is that many of the collectors do traverse residential areas and collect traffic from those areas to feed the other collectors and arterials in the system.
Allocates the costs for neighborhood routes and local streets to residential uses
Allocates the costs for residential uses on a per unit basis for both single family and multifamily units.
Uses the minimum parking space requirements based on the Tigard Development Code for non-residential uses with a 5-space minimum and 200-space maximum. Like the trip generation rates, the parking space requirements are based on size of building and type of use. However, this approach takes into account businesses that draw from a larger area than just Tigard. The argument is that above 200 spaces, the traffic is more likely regional traffic, which comes via the state routes. The 5-space minimum is to establish a minimum amount for the billing to compensate for the costs of preparing and mailing out the bills.