SMF Anyone?


That’s Street Maintenance Fee.

You can’t say Sam Adams doesn’t have courage. He’s looking at ways to close Portland’s street maintenance backlog, and find some dollars for safety programs.

The ultimate proposal will likely be a combination of two or three funding mechanisms, possibly including a local gas tax and/or a Street Maintenance Fee (a utility fee added to your water bill based on the # of auto trips your property type generates).

You can read more on OregonLive. They call it ‘unsexy’, which strikes me as charitable.

Nonetheless, it’s important. We’re gradually letting a multi-billion-dollar City asset crumble.

Sam is doing it right, consulting all the stakeholder groups and doing a series of community meetings. Drop by one:


Commissioner Sam Adams to Hold Series of Town Hall Meetings
to Discuss Portland’s Ailing Transportation System

Currently, 32% of Portland’s arterial streets, 22% of the bridges, and 43% of the traffic signals are in poor condition. Deferred maintenance adds an estimated $9 million annually to the $425 million transportation backlog that exists. Given current funding, money does not exist to adequately address these issues.

Commissioner Sam Adams is taking this issue to the public in an effort to ensure a sustainable and safe transportation system for the future. Over the next few weeks, Commissioner Adams, the Portland Office of Transportation, and the Portland Neighborhood District Coalitions are hosting Town Hall meetings to discuss transportation funding, and maintenance and safety needs. These Town Hall meetings will provide residents of Portland a unique opportunity to learn about the current transportation funding situation and provide their input on how to fix the problem.

Mark Lear has been temporarily pulled from his position as Traffic Investigations Manager and will lead the public outreach campaign to build support for increased funding for PDOT maintenance and safety projects. If you have questions about these meetings or the outreach effort, please contact Mark Lear at 503-823-7604 or Jamie Waltz, who’s assisting Mark, at 503-823-7101.

Community Town Hall Meetings

  • Southwest Portland: Tuesday, June 19, 7-9 p.m., Multnomah Center, 7688 SW Capitol Highway
  • Southeast Portland: Wednesday, June 20, 7-9 p.m., St. Philip Neri Church, Carvlin Hall, 2408 SE 16th Avenue
  • North & Northeast Portland: Tuesday, June 26, 7-9 p.m., King Neighborhood Facility, 4815 NE 7th Avenue
  • Northwest Portland: Wednesday, June 27, 7-9 p.m., Friendly House Conference Room, 1737 NW 26th Avenue
  • Central Northeast & East Portland: Monday, July 2, 7-9 p.m., Firehouse #12, 4415 NE 87th Avenue

25 responses to “SMF Anyone?”

  1. All the highways in this state are in dreadful condition! Just take a drive into Washington and see the difference. All the money is getting sucked into streetcars and MAX and not going where it should go. BTW, are they going to do anything to fix the dreadful problems of vagrants on the MAX? I had one try to pick a fight with me tonight and this afternoon there was a group of vagrants with PIT BULLS …. ON THE MAX! And they did NOT have leashes. Give me a break. Where are the security guards???

  2. Hmmm… It seems to me that readers were just pointing out that the Seattle area spends more on transit than we do…

    Perhaps it has something to do with Washington actually passing transportation funding measures, not with how they allocate it across the modes…

    The City of Portland puts about $2M of parking meter revenue into Streetcar operations, while the maintenance backlog grows by at least $9M per year. Your solution does not come close to matching the problem.

  3. Also – it is worth noting that this backlog is for those streets the city is responsible for. So the unpaved streets in the city are not included. Until they are paved they are not in the equation for maintenance. That is another challenge – and possible increase in need.

  4. Although I’d describe myself as pro-transit and bike commute at least 4 days a week to work I have to say that if the city does pass a street maintenance fee and/or a gas tax it’s critical that all of the money collected goes towards getting rid of the maintenance backlog, without affecting current funding. The public will probably support this measure, but only if they can be assured there won’t be a bait-and-switch (i.e. we’ve go this new source of revenue, so we can put the old money somewhere else), or that it will be used for new projects (especially something non-auto related).

    Sam’s going to have a lot of work to do to win over the skeptics, I hope he’s got a good plan and wish him the best of luck putting it into action.

  5. Yeah, that’s my fear, too–that some of the money
    (old and new) will be shuttled into Portland’s dysfunctional rail system.

    Otherwise, I’d be in favor of it; after all, as a transit user, I have to ride buses on those streets.

  6. I confess that I’m a skeptic when it comes to more money for PDOT. While there is a lot of talk about “maintenance first,” it would be helpful to see exactly where and how the almost $200 million annual PDOT budget is spent.
    But if more $ is necessary, here is an option:
    Paid parking…currently the City gives away free one of its greatest assets, curbside parking, both residental and commercial. Only the Lloyd District has meters outside of Downtown, SoWa & the Pearl.
    A parking fee would be more palatable, if we could shift some of the CSO fees on our sewer bills to the actual sources…road runoff. Oil, gasoline and tire debris constitute a major portion of the contamination in the Willamette which ratepayers are now fixing to the tune of $1.4 Billion. The adjustment seems obvious….a tax on oil, tire and gasoline sales to cover some of the CSO bill. Reductions in those fees might ease the passage of a parking fee…say $1 per slot per month, so most residences would pay a couple of bucks a month, while Freddies would pay substantially more.
    Put it on our “utility bill” along with water, sewer, etc., and it would be hardly noticed when combined with the above shift to “contamination fees” on oil, gas and tires. Luckily Sam is Commissioner for both BES and PDOT.
    Or maybe the three long time downtown urban renewal areas (South Park Blocks, Downtown Waterfront and North Waterfront) should be terminated, with those taxes going into the general fund, a portion of which could pay for safety improvements throughout the City.

  7. Lenny, having served on PDOT’s budget advisory committee I can tell you that they are down to the bone. They’ve been cutting and cutting over the last decade.

    As to a parking tax, it’s one of the options Sam is looking at. From a policy point of view, I like it a lot, but I suspect it won’t be one of the more politically popular options.

  8. Somewhat misrepresented in Sam’s “user pays” oratory suggests he is primarily requesting funds for street maintenance. Bike facilities, curb extensions, streetscapes, super-sizing sidewalks and transit subsidies should not be coupled and disguised within a maintenance funding request. Missing from Sam’s oratory is the reality that that bicyclists and transit riders are users of the road too, and therefore sharing the road must also mean sharing the financial responsibility. Balancing the funding resources must include a bicycle tax directly assessed on adult bicyclists and the bicycle mode of transport that would pay the price tag for any glorified platinum infrastructure. Also included must be increased transit fares to cover a far greater share than the current 21% for just transit operating expenses. Adding surcharges to transit fares must become an essential financing component and development tool to help to pay for transit infrastructure and roadway maintenance where there is heavy transit use. Then there is the obesity funded Portland Streetcar that requires millions of dollars of operating subsidies annually, in part from motorist paid parking meter revenues, just to keep rolling. Redirecting those parking meter dollars and the money spent on going platinum would go a long way to reducing Portland’s street maintenance backlog. The taxes and fees drivers and motor freight carriers pay should NOT be subsidizing the users of other modes of transport. Flashy concepts such as building streetcar systems should not be constructed unless they can prove financial self-sustainability and not create additional congestion by interfering with other vehicular traffic on any of the proposed routes.

  9. Terry, I would think then that you would love the SMF concept, since it is based on trip generation, and could be easily done regardless of mode (in fact, I’m not even sure the models would be detailed enough to allow basing it only on auto trips).

  10. I’d support giving more money to PDOT, and telling them to spend it in the way that has the best cost/benefit ratio. When you start dedicating funds to road maintenance and only road maintenance, you make things very complicated for when they are, say, rebuilding a street in SW, and want to add sidewalks, (that is the cheapest time to do it,) but they can’t, because the “sidewalk fund” ran out of money that budget cycle already…

    But maybe I’m weird that way.

  11. Matthew:

    That’s a good point, the problem is how it’s presented to the public. If it’s presented to the public as a way to fix the big maintenance backlog on our streets, and then they turn around and use it to fund bike facilities (as Terry complained) then there are going to be a lot of people out there who feel like they’ve been hornswoggled.

    If it’s going to be a multi-purpose fund, where things like curb extensions, bike parking, Streetcar, and other types of projects are included Sam should definitely say so up front. It might have less a chance of passing, but at least if the money gets diverted to the above-mentioned projects the public will have been warned.

  12. I support spending money for bike paths and bike lanes and whatnot. Sidewalks too. We all use the roads.

    I have no problem with that. And since a bicycle does almost zero damage to pavement then there really is no “maintenance” needed. However I would support a little bit of a tax for some “upkeep”.

    Bike lanes are useless if they are filled with debris, glass, blackberry bushes and foliage.

    I fully support paying for more road maintenance, to support all modes. All major bus stops should have heavy duty concrete pads. All bike lanes should be kept clean. Roads should be fixed and maintained.

    And can we please stop cutting the roads for every single time a phone company or cable company needs to get to 1 line under the road? Why is there not some sort of requirement that in order to cut the road you have to repave a certain minimum feet of of it from one edge of the road to the other. All of the hundreds of seams are a pain in the ask and a big safety issue for motorcyclists and scooters, and they let roads degrade faster than normal…

    I think a good balance of parking fees, street maintenance fees, and other sources is the right answer. Balance.

    We need all of it. No point in establishing little fiefdoms. We all share the city…

  13. Sam should definitely say so up front.

    If you take the time to go to one of the meetings, I think you’ll find that Sam is being VERY explicit. It’s about maintenance, safety, bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

    Yes, there will be some money for bicycle infrastructure, but the huge bulk of the money goes for maintenance.

  14. My suggestion for a Street Maintenance Fee:

    (1) Require it be spent on maintaining and improving existing roads, including paving unpaid roads. This would include some pedestrian and bicycle facilities like striped lanes, traffic calming, and curb extensions, but would exclude bicycle paths, bus or bike shelters, and anything having to do with streetcars.

    (2) Require that all or most revenue be spent locally. SMF collected in Montavilla pays for maintenance and improvements in Montavilla. Each neighborhood organization sets its own priorities for maintenance and improvement.

    (3) Exception to (2): Money collected from businesses goes 50% to the neighborhood, 50% to maintaining and improving citywide freight infrastructure.

    Make the fee expressly about fixing streets in the payor’s neighborhood, and that should go a long way to building support. If it gives neighborhood organizations funding and real power to make decisions, that also should translate into political support.

    I do think whatever the package is, the City Council should send it to the ballot for voter approval. Support from the business community and neighborhood organizations should help a lot.

  15. “Make the fee expressly about fixing streets in the payor’s neighborhood”

    You are right, that is the way to get it passed. And it isn’t like that would be very hard, there is plenty of work to go around in all areas of the city, and if they wanted to be really clever, they could get the bills to actually list what the closest projects were… The information is already on portlandmaps.com, they’d just need to print it out…

    “And can we please stop cutting the roads for every single time a phone company or cable company needs to get to 1 line under the road? Why is there not some sort of requirement that in order to cut the road you have to repave a certain minimum feet of of it from one edge of the road to the other.”

    It isn’t a bad idea. In fact, some cities do make them repave the entire street if they do anything. You are effectively shifting part of the road maintenance cost to the phone/cable/gas/water (hey, that is the city)/sewer (city again) companies. And they would pass those charges onto the customers, resulting in a kind of stealth tax increase. The problem is that certain places get dug up more often, (I used to live at the top of Burnside in the west hills, and Burnside has be trenched probably 30 times in the last 15 years. Add to that freezing, and the hillside sliding onto it, and it is always in awful shape,) and would therefor get repaved more often than it really needed to be, where as other streets need work, but aren’t being dug up often enough…

  16. “You are effectively shifting part of the road maintenance cost to the phone/cable/gas/water (hey, that is the city)/sewer (city again) companies. And they would pass those charges onto the customers, resulting in a kind of stealth tax increase.”

    I know that utilities would ultimately pass the costs along, but it would save money in two ways.

    1. Roads should last longer between repairs.

    2. Utilities might think twice about cutting up streets and combine tasks or limit the need for going across the street, or build in better planning and infrastructure (like junction boxes on either side with large conduit that wires can be run through, and other ideas like that).

    Additionally, the costs passed on to consumers would probably be less than the amounts saved by #1 and #2.

    I know what you mean about Burnside. I swear I have to put the Jeep in 4 wheel drive anymore to get over Burnside. :) I would be uncomfortable in a car with low ground clearance. (grin).

    Boones Ferry in SW Portland is rapidly approaching that status as well, with all the new development going on in there. Many many seams. I don’t think there has been a week gone by in the last year where there has not been at least one steel plate in that road…

  17. I’m highly against funds staying local to the neighborhood from which they are generated. That’s how our public schools have been ruined in poor neighborhoods. Why should NW and Irvington get shiny new streets while North Portland and Lents and NE get stuck with the same deteriorating streets?

  18. How about a minimum percentage for funds to stay in the local neighborhood? I think PDOT should have some flexibility to spread the money around areas where it is most needed, but taxpayers need some degree of reassurance that their neighborhood won’t be completely ignored. I think the greater fear is not on the part of those in Irvington that their money might go elsewhere, but instead that those in Lents may now be paying _more_ into a system before and still get less improvement than other areas.

    Would a two-thirds local spending guarantee give enough flexibility to PDOT while assuaging taxpayer trepidation?

    – Bob R.

  19. I’m highly against funds staying local to the neighborhood from which they are generated. That’s how our public schools have been ruined in poor neighborhoods. Why should NW and Irvington get shiny new streets while North Portland and Lents and NE get stuck with the same deteriorating streets?

    The reason schools are ruined in poor neighborhoods by local funding is that the taxes are based on property value. High value property can generate more money at lower rates. That’s different than a flat fee per household, which doesn’t favor rich or poor neighborhoods.

    Pooling all the money and passing it out city-wide would almost automatically create a political process, would tend to favor rich neighborhoods, which tend to have more political pull. But if money was spent by neighborhood, Irvington would get no more money per capita than Lents. In fact, any neighborhood with a lot of trip-generating businesses (strip malls, big box stores) would get more money for maintenance than mostly residential neighborhoods with small “main street” type businesses.

    I see neighborhood-based spending as the great equalizer.

    Plus, it’s more likely to win public support, IMO, if you know you’ll be paying to fix potholes in your neighborhood instead of buying in repaving projects somewhere across town.

  20. One way to give neighborhoods more say is to do a parking tax neighborhood by neighborhood. If you want more sidewalks, better maintenance, more safety improvements, agree to a fee for residential and commerical on street parking. This could be done with meters on commerical streets, parking permits on adjacent residential streets, and a simple monthly fee per parking spot elsewhere.
    If these street issues are not a concern, then such a fee would probably not be favored. Sam tried this in a couple of business districts with no success, suggesting there is not such a crisis.
    In the meantime I think PDOT should transfer leaf removal to BES…its really done to keep storm drains working, reduce or eliminate staffing for the Freight Committee…a publicly staffed lobbying organization for more roads, and stretch out its maintenance schedule…I have seen streets re-paved that looked almost brand new. And remember, pot holes are low cost random speed bumps. Everyone should just slow down.

  21. Just stop maintaining the roads. Give what money there is back to the people, and let pro-auto users come up with an organization to maintain and build roads.

    We’ll see how much support it gets then, when the rich stop paying for it and the less rich can’t use it because they’ve been sucking at the tit of Government wealth redistribution for so long.

    I mean seriously, road users might be against it, but transit users should be absolutely for doing such a thing.

    :) (yes there is slight sarcasm to this post, but a whole bunch of truth)

  22. I find it funny that the city and others can come up with ludicrous sums of money to misuse transit (i.e. streetcar) purely as an commercial development tool, yet new fees are necessary to pay for the infrastructure (roads) that most commerce depends upon.

    Keep Portland weird, indeed.

  23. Aaron starts another round of the factless assertion game. The fun thing about this game is that anybody can play.

    I find it funny that the city and others can come up with ludicrous sums of money

    They haven’t.

    to misuse transit (i.e. streetcar)

    Not a misuse.

    purely as an commercial development tool,

    Nope. Says who?

    yet new fees are necessary to pay for the infrastructure (roads) that most commerce depends upon.

    That’s because the current level of funding cannot maintain the current system, not even close.

    Thanks for playing.

  24. Aaron starts another round of the factless assertion game. The fun thing about this game is that anybody can play.

    I’ll play:

    Original Portland Streetcar line, 4.8 mile loop: $57M capital cost.

    Extension to Riverplace, .6 mile of route: $16M capital cost.

    Extension to Gibbs, .6 mile of route: $15.8M capital cost.

    Extension to Lowell, .6 mile of route: $13.5M capital cost.

    Total cost of Streetcar: $102.3 million. This of course doesn’t include the annual operating subsidy that is largely paid for outside the Streetcar neighborhood, largely from TriMet.

    In other words, had Streetcar not been constructed serving the narrow interests (mainly Pearl District, Riverplace and SoWa developers, and the non-tax paying Portland State University and OHSU campuses) that would have covered 25% of the city’s transportation backlog citywide. Since many of these developments would have occurred anyways, having them built without the tax abatements/credits that they receive would have generated additional revenue to further reduce the transportation infrastructure backlog. Parking meter revenues could cover the backlog in the downtown area (and on NW 23rd, Pearl District, Old Town, Lloyd District).

    Instead, property tax payers in Lents and Southwest, among other neighborhoods, still enjoy “urban amenities” such as unimproved gravel roads with no storm sewer system, lack of sidewalks, unsafe transit boarding locations (and/or non-ADA compliant – that is, if they even have transit access), deficient street lighting, poor sight lines – and of course your run-of-the-mill poor pavement, potholes, and other pavement issues.

    If the current level of funding cannot maintain the current system, then why are there still planning meetings to extend Streetcar every which direction? After all, the funding source is identical – if we can’t maintain the streets that every Portland resident depends on day in and day out, how can we afford to build a Streetcar that only a tiny percentage of them will use (9,000 daily riders compared to Portland’s population of 562,690 – less than 2% of Portland’s population), but costs the same?

  25. Erik –

    1. You’re comparing the streetcar’s construction capital costs, which apply to infrastructure which will last decades, against Portland’s annual maintenance budget.

    2. 9,000 (now 10,000) daily riders is nothing to sneeze at for a single transit line.

    3. Lents is receiving new streetscapes and new transit service under current budgets. (Including Light Rail, gasp!)

    4. I’m glad you care so much about how Portland allocates it’s capital dollars. How did you react to the approx. $3 million spent by your city of Tualatin on a pedestrian bridge? Did you jump all over your local officials about how many sidewalks and bus shelters that could have built?

    5. I’m glad you acknowledge that TriMet’s main contribution to the streetcar is operating funds. TriMet would have to have spent this to operate bus service to serve the same destinations. (But that’s been explained to you how many dozen times already?)

    – Bob R.

Leave a Reply to Chris Smith Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *