Carson City has reached a crossroads on how to adequately fund street maintenance.
At this month’s “Coffee and Conversation with the Mayor” on Thursday morning in the Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Lori Bagwell invited her audience to come “spin the wheel” to decide which city programs to cut to reallocate funding to the roads. She brought an actual game-show-style wheel, each slice containing a piece of funding from the city audit.
Bagwell said that she wanted to make the point that most residents don’t want to cut city programs, so the city will have to find ways to expand road funding. She encouraged participants to not only give her direct feedback, but to complete the Transportation Funding Survey online at the carson.org homepage.
At the last Board of Supervisors meeting, city staff presented a report detailing some options for filling the gap in transportation funding. It is likely that the city will need to adopt a “multi-phased” approach, combining several fixed and variable rates.
Some options that the city favors include using a program of local improvements, a general improvement district, assessing a road utility fee, creating a government services tax, or a special purpose sales tax. “Local improvements” and “general improvements” would function like a property tax.
During the pandemic, Carson City lost $600,000 in road taxes, Bagwell said. The board supplemented those losses with federal CARES Act funding.
Local taxes, fees, and fund transfers currently pay for approximately 20 percent of the city’s transportation revenue, with the other 80 percent coming from federal funding. Since 2017, the board has put all of that funding entirely toward regional roads, Bagwell said. Without local road funding, neighborhood streets have reached, and will continue to reach, failing conditions.
“(People tell me), ‘The cracks are getting wider. Things are growing in the cracks,’” Bagwell said. “You spin the wheel and tell me what to cut.”
Find the Transportation Funding Survey at the top of the carson.org homepage, or go to https://www.carson.org/government/departments-g-z/public-works/2021-transportation-funding-survey
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