The details
During a March 5 work session, city staff presented council members with several options to increase funding for street maintenance.
“The challenge that we have is that this [funding] target keeps moving on us, both with growth and price increases,” Transportation and Public Works Assistant Director Lane Zarate said.
She said that population increase results in an increase in development, which in turn increases the demand for transportation services and street maintenance citywide. In terms of inflation, while the city has been increasing street maintenance funding, it hasn’t been able to keep up with rising contract costs.
“Our money isn’t going as far as it used to,” Zarate said. “Both of these issues together compound each other and leave us where we are today.”
Zarate explained that current road conditions in Fort Worth include the following three categories:
- Gray streets, which consist of 3,200 lane-miles in good condition that need preservation
- Orange streets, which consist of 3,055 lane-miles that need maintenance
- Red streets, which consist of 1,880 lane-miles that need reconstruction
Zarate said that streets that need reconstruction are typically paid for with bond funding, whereas streets that need maintenance and preservation are paid for by street maintenance funding. She said that $28.3 million is used annually for street maintenance and that 30% of that funding is used for “vital” projects. A project is deemed vital if it is a time-sensitive project where putting it off a year or longer would increase the associated costs, making it a more expensive procedure and possibly making it a full reconstruction project rather than a maintenance issue.
“The story that this tells is two-fold,” Zarate said. “The first is that our current maintenance funding is not sufficient to prevent [further] deterioration. Second, the impact of deferred maintenance impacts everybody.”
Christianne Simmons—chief transformation officer for FWLab, which manages the city's efforts in comprehensive planning, capital programming, budgeting, performance management and data analytics—presented the council with several funding alternatives and their potential limitations. They include:
- General obligation bonds, which requires voter approval
- Roadway impact fees, which is limited to growth needs
- Sales tax, which requires general fund revenue offset
- Grants and/or matching funds from the Texas Department of Transportation, Tarrant County or other organizations, which has unreliable availability
- Property tax, which requires general fund revenue offset
Simmons explained that a street maintenance fee is a monthly fee proportional to traffic generation and has the following characteristics:
- Based on vehicle trips by land use
- Ongoing fee for system use
- Dedicated to transportation purposes
- Charged on utility bills and applied to all developed properties, including those exempt from ad valorem taxes
- $9.22 for single-family homes
- $5.65 for one multifamily unit
- $9.08 per 1,000 square feet of office space
- $12.06 per 1,000 square feet of retail/commercial space
- $15.80 per 1,000 square feet of dining space
- $2.67 per 1,000 square feet of industrial space
- $2.71 per 1,000 square feet of institutional space
The report was for informational purposes only. The news release states that further evaluation of the fee will continue and council did not take action on this issue.
