As previously posted, Alderpersons Brad Firkus (District 3) and Chad Doran (District 15) recently submitted resolution #9-R-21 which, if passed, would direct the mayor to include in the 2022 executive budget funds to pay a consulting firm to “determine the feasibility of creating a transportation utility for the city of Appleton”.
I reached out to them in the hopes that they would be able to outline how those transportation utility fees would be determined and what sort of costs various property owners (single family homeowners vs. commercial businesses vs. an apartment complex) could expect to be charged.
They both noted that this resolution was just asking to study the creation a transportation utility. And, as far as how a transportation utility in Appleton would look in practice, Alderperson Firkus said, “it’s too early to say exactly how this would be done, since there are multiple ways to do this. Neenah, Harrison, and Buchanan each have one and each is a bit different in their own approach.”
Alderperson Firkus gave a general overview of how such a utility might work and pointed out that under this system it was possible that single family homes may end up paying less than they do currently with the wheel tax.
[I]f we don’t want to be super detailed, we can group different types of properties into broader categories. So on one end of complexity you could say, well a drive through generates this much traffic per day and a sit down restaurant generates this much traffic, and a neighbor tavern with food service generates this much, or on the other end of the scale you could say dining establishments generate this much traffic and not use the different more detailed trip counts for each more detailed category and just use some sort of average or something to that effect and apply the same trip count number to each of those property types.
Once you determine your trips per day number for the different property types, next you apply a rate per trip to determine a property’s transportation user fee. For example, a residential property with a single family home on it may generate about 8.1 trips per day. If you were to set your rate at $0.01/trip that would come out to a little less than $30 per year. Considering the average household in Appleton has about two cars, that would be less than what the $40 an average household pays in wheel tax right now. The rate per trip could be more or less than that amount if we go this route, but that’s the basics on how this works.
A fully implemented plan could include other modifications or specifications. For example, you could have one rate for residential properties, one for commercial, one for industrial properties, and another for institutional properties like schools, hospitals, churches, and government properties, like parks and parking ramps. This way you could give you more control over how much you charge different types of land usage. An other example is you could add surcharges on top of the fee. For example, if you wanted properties that induce a lot of traffic from heavy trucking that can cause more wear and tear on our roads you may be able to charge them a flat fee on top of their calculated fee.
Alderperson Doran stressed that the way Appleton currently funds its roads is not sustainable and went on to say, “[O]ver the last 10-15 years, the city has been borrowing more and more each year to fund our road projects and paying fewer of them in cash from our general fund. There are a number of reasons this is happening. Less state aid, increased construction costs, the ability to borrow for roads more so than other city projects, etc.”
He sees a transportation utility study as part of “a two-pronged approach to look at our road program. One, how we pay for it and two, are there changes to the way we build/maintain roads in general that we can make to lower our costs and lengthen the life of our roads. I will say that at this point we have no answers for either of these things and we don’t know what we will find, but what Brad and I both agree on, is that we have to be looking for solutions.” He said they had no preconceived ideas in how to fix these problems and that “Our goal in using this idea or any other, is to ensure we are adequately funding our road program to the level of expectations our community has, in a financially sustainable manner.”
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