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Over the past month, the Portland City Council hit the gas pedal on its road-paving ambitions.
The council in late April passed a street fee that is estimated to bring in around $47 million annually to help the Portland Bureau of Transportation maintain roads.
The average monthly fee will appear on Portlanders’ monthly utility bill, adding around $12 for homeowners, $8.40 for renters and $61 for businesses. Three-quarters of the revenues must go toward street maintenance and repair, while the other 25% will go toward advancing the goals of the city’s traffic safety initiative, Vision Zero, and sidewalk improvement projects.
The City Council passed the fee by a 9-3 vote. Councilors Eric Zimmerman, Dan Ryan and Loretta Smith voted against it, arguing that imposing yet another fee on Portlanders would cause even more economic stress in already expensive times.
Two weeks earlier, the council passed a separate fee imposed on utility companies that dig up Portland streets to install infrastructure. That fee is estimated to bring in an additional $22 million per year, and will also go to the Portland Bureau of Transportation for street maintenance.
Councilor Olivia Clark championed both of the new fees.
The $69 million will be added each year to PBOT’s $580 million annual budget. (The vast majority of that money is restricted to certain uses, so cannot be used for street maintenance.)
The city has $6.6 billion worth of deferred road maintenance, the most recent estimates show. The crumbling blacktop is largely the result of decisions made decades before the current city councilors held office—even Councilor Steve Novick, who during his first term in office tried to pass a similar fee in 2014. But the combination of declining gas tax revenues and declining parking fee revenues has recently compounded the problem, causing annual budget deficits for PBOT for the past seven years, which resulted in layoffs and cuts to both major projects and street maintenance.
