BEND, OR -- Bend City crews expect to conduct around four and a half million dollars’ worth of street preservation work this year. The plan for paving, chip sealing and slurry seals recently approved by the City Council came alongside agreement for the first phase of a transportation fee to help pay for road maintenance. 

"Transportation’s one of the hardest things to fund. The state’s struggling with it. It’s happening across the country. We’ve built all these roads, we don’t have enough funds to maintain them," City Manager Eric King tells KBND News. Bend utility customers will see the transportation fee on their July utility bill, which goes out in August, "We’re doing a three-phase implementation. So, this first phase that Council voted on was approximately a $5 per month charge, for a resident. And then for businesses, it’s a wide range based on their impact." King says, "The next step in that is for us to take this next year and really gather more data from business license registrations. So, on the non-residential it really is more complicated, to really dive into that impact and get more data before we implement phase two, which presumably would be about a year from now." The fee amount increases in subsequent phases. 

King acknowledges billing utility customers doesn’t collect revenue from everyone who uses city streets. "That ordinance was based on a lot of the feedback that we received. So, between phase two and phase three, Council directed me to come back, looking at other tools; including those tools that would assess fees for those using our system that come from outside the city or visitors. Most likely, that’s in the form of a fuel tax or a seasonal fuel tax. There’s variations of that. So, that was the direction- before we go to full implementation with phase three, let’s look at that tool." A gas tax would require voter approval.