City studies transportation upkeep fee

By Dan MacArthur
Fossil Creek Current

Residents may get an unwelcome Valentine in the form of bigger utility bills if the Fort Collins City Council pursues a new transportation maintenance fee to fill a $2.6 million pothole in next year's budget.

The council in a Feb. 14 study session is expected to direct the city staff whether to proceed with developing a plan for implementing the fee. As a separate fee earmarked for a specific purpose, rather than a general tax increase, no public vote is required.

With revenues from the fee already built into the anticipated 2007 city budget, something's got to give if the council doesn't proceed. That means finding another source of revenue or making even more cuts next year in addition to the $5 million already painfully pared from this year's budget.

"We're pretty much down to a budget that doesn't have much fat," said Mayor Doug Hutchinson.

Still, he emphasized, the new transportation fee is by no means a done deal and will face some tough scrutiny from a council committed to not increasing the cost of government.

"We will be considering that as one of several options," said Hutchinson. "We will be looking at that very soberly and carefully."

In fact, Hutchinson noted that the council last fall deliberately deferred consideration of the proposal by staff to fill that projected 2007 shortfall. "We really need to think this through," he said.

If city council tells the staff to proceed, fees should be in place by year's end, said Ron Phillips, executive director of transportation services.

While too premature to predict, Phillips said, any transportation maintenance fee likely would be similar to the one considered in 1996 before the council rejected the proposal in a split vote. The fee structure typically takes into account the amount of traffic generated by a particular property. He said the proposal a decade ago called for collecting a $2 monthly fee from homeowners with commensurately increasing fees for businesses, depending on the demands they create on maintaining the road system.

That would be similar to the street maintenance utility fee imposed in 2001 by neighboring Loveland. That fee, dedicated strictly to street maintenance, in 2005 generated about $1 million, according to public works director Keith Reester. He said that covers nearly a third of the annual cost to maintain streets in the Sweetheart City - just as it was intended to do.

Reester said the fee is imposed on all city utility customers, and the city also assesses a stormwater fee. It is based on nationally accepted models predicting the amount of car and truck traffic generated by six different categories of land use.

The monthly transportation maintenance fee ranges from $1.25 for every residential housing unit, to nearly $14 an acre for industrial uses, just over $18 an acre for commercial and institutional uses, almost $55 an acre for general retail, and more than $139 an acre for high-traffic retail uses. Fees assessed against residential units account for about a third of the revenues generated, Reester said.

While reluctant to generalize too broadly, he said there has been no great controversy about the fees in Loveland.

Ironically, Reester said, Loveland is indebted to Fort Collins for fighting a long, precedent-setting legal battle making it possible for cities to impose transportation maintenance fees.

Fort Collins in 1984 imposed what was then known as a transportation utilities fee. A group of citizens successfully challenged its legality, and the district court ordered the city to stop collecting the fee and refund to residents what it had already collected.

The city persevered, however, until the state Supreme Court largely overturned the lower court ruling and found the transportation utility fee to be constitutional. But by that time, residents had approved the first in a series of sales tax issues dedicated to street maintenance, and the transportation utility fee was not again imposed.