|Written by Colin Staub, Newberg Graphic

A street fee to augment maintenance funding on Newberg’s roads has again been tabled by the City Council, this time to March 6. But after the council’s discussion last week, it appears surer than ever that a fee of some kind will be levied to fund road maintenance. 

The fee is ultimately designed to raise about $1.2 million annually for street repairs and is part of a package plan that also includes a future local gas tax. A gas tax must go to a vote of the public, however, while a monthly street fee does not. 

Who pays what?

As proposed to the council last week (after a hearing was continued from December), single-family homeowners would pay $4.99 per month for the street fee. It would be attached to their monthly utility bills, which are now officially termed “municipal services statements.” 

Non-residential users would get hit with more complicated costs. They are lumped into categories, “manufacturing,” “sit down restaurant” and “auto repair” for instance. Each is levied a fee based approximately on the number of trips that type of business generates. 

The highest payer in the city would be Fred Meyer, which would be charged more than $5,500 per month under the formula. But the council had asked city staff to prepare a fee cap clause, and the proposal last week capped monthly fees at $600, meaning nobody would pay higher than that amount. 

Almost nobody, that is. 

School district could get hit three times

Without any kind of fee cap, the Newberg School District and George Fox University would both pay a similar amount between $3,300 and $3,400. 

But even with the proposed $600 fee cap the Newberg School District would get hit three times, a $600 fee each for three “categories”: elementary, middle and high schools. 

“This whole model is based on trip generation,” Public Works Director Jay Harris told the council, explaining that the different school categories generate different numbers of trips (kids might bus to school in elementary school, but then drive themselves to school later in high school). 

“Nobody’s trying to pick on the school district, it’s that we were trying to quantify in a better manner using the methodology of trip generation,” Harris said. 

GFU, on the other hand, would only get hit with one $600 fee. Harris justified that move by explaining that the trip generation for the university was fairly “well-defined,” and therefore didn’t merit breaking it down into separate categories like the school district. 

Still, Councilor Scott Essin said he’d heard concerns from the public that the fee would unfairly charge a public institution three times what it would a private institution, despite their relatively similar service populations (the school district has 4,392 students inside Newberg, and GFU has 3,793). 

In an email to the council, Newberg School District Superintendent Kym LeBlanc-Esparza said the district calculated the fee would cost the schools about $31,000 each year. Although she said the district empathizes with the city’s need to fund street maintenance, she said with the district’s budget year only about halfway complete, a sudden $1,800 monthly charge beginning in March would mean the district would have to pay without having the opportunity to budget for the fee. 

She also referenced the 49 percent of families in the district “whose income is at such a low level, their children qualify for free or reduced meals,” and noted that for these families, “the cost could certainly be a very difficult one to incur.” 

Subsidizing heavy users?

Local resident Robert Soppe was the lone member of the public to show up and testify on the fee (a fact which by itself concerned some councilors, given the substantial backlash the fee has received outside of council meetings and in online forums). 

Soppe has spoken on other issues in support of fees that charge the users of a system for maintenance of that system, and he praised the fee proposal for attempting to do that. But he took issue with the fee making no distinction between different types of vehicles. Instead, it treats all “trips” the same, no matter whether it’s a passenger car or a fully-loaded truck. 

“The difference in impact on the road, which drives the need for the maintenance you’re attempting to fund, is on the order of one-to-10,000 times more for the truck than for the passenger vehicle,” Soppe said. 

He also took issue with the fee cap, which he saw as ratepayers subsidizing the fee for a dozen larger users. While those users would get hit with large bills, Soppe noted that’s because they have a larger impact on the roads. 

Modifications

Councilor Patrick Johnson reminded the council that a citizen committee had considered the fee issue extensively before it arrived before the council. 

“I would hate for us to have another issue where we go out and ask these folks for their time, and then they come back with a recommendation and we go, ‘Well, you know what, we’re just going to start over at the City Council level and do it our own way,’” he said. “That concerns me.” 

But as deliberations began, it was clear council members were not comfortable with the fee as it stood. 

Mayor Bob Andrews said he wanted to see the monthly cap raised from $600 to $1,000, and also that the school district not be broken down by category but be levied a single fee. 

“It’d be a little increase for some, it’d be a little decrease for others (the school district), but that’d be uniform across whether it’s profit, nonprofit or otherwise,” he said. 

Andrews said he’d also like to see a potential “heavy vehicle use” clause that would levy an amount separate from the regular street fee, on vehicles that impose excess wear and tear on the roads. 

Finally, Andrews asked that the fee not go into effect until at least June 30, so everyone has more time to plan for it. 

Harris said he will return to the road funding subcommittee with the new considerations brought up by the council: the possibility of including the Chehalem Park and Recreation District as a whole in the fee cap (as it stands, all of its facilities would be charged separately), raising the fee limit to $1,000, removing the separate school categories, and postponing the fee until at least June 30. 

The council unanimously voted to continue the hearing to March 6. After the hearing Harris said the subcommittee will reconvene for a public meeting tentatively during the first week in February.