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Raleigh staff recommend eliminating property assessments for 17 pending street and sidewalk projects
Summary
City staff urged the City Council to rescind assessment resolutions for 17 pending projects, refund roughly $200,000 in advance payments and stop future assessment-based petition programs, citing low cost recovery and equity concerns.
City of Raleigh staff recommended that the City Council rescind assessment resolutions on 17 pending street- and sidewalk-improvement projects, authorize refunds of advance payments totaling about $200,000, and end the practice of using property assessments to recover costs for future street-improvement petitions.
Bradley Kimbrell, a city staff member presenting the agenda item, told council members that assessments are liens applied to properties to recover construction costs and that rates used to calculate frontage-based charges were last updated more than 20 years ago. Kimbrell said assessments currently recover about 2 percent of actual construction costs and that administrative effort makes collection costly relative to revenue.
The recommendation grew from a 2022 council request to evaluate the city’s assessment and petition programs. Kimbrell outlined three options: proceed with public hearings and assessment roll adoption on 12 completed projects; rescind assessments on eight city-initiated capital improvement projects (CIP) while proceeding on remaining petition projects (with roughly $180,000 in advance payments to refund for the eight CIPs); or staff’s preferred Option 3, to eliminate assessments on all 17 pending projects and refund approximately $200,000 collected in advance payments. Kimbrell told council that two projects listed in the backup memo, Granville Drive and Carolina Avenue, are funded through capital reserves and currently in design despite an error in the memo.
Council members pressed staff on legal and administrative implications. Councilor Branch asked whether rescinding assessments on older projects could prompt complaints from property owners who previously paid; the City Attorney replied that imposing or rescinding assessments is within council purview, and that refunds would be issued to the current property owner because assessments attach to the property and are reflected in sale transactions. Councilor Patton and others noted the tension between honoring prior public notices and the administrative burden and inequity of petition-based charges: some property owners prepaid and some did not, and prepaid sums cannot be guaranteed to be returned to the original payer, staff said.
Several council members framed the change as consistent with past policy shifts. Kimbrell recalled that in 2011 council stopped taking assessments on petition sidewalk projects and that in 2018 the city ceased creating new assessment-based CIP projects; the petition sidewalk program was suspended in 2020 and formally eliminated in 2023. Councilors asked staff to emphasize alternatives and to tie future prioritization to the city’s Active Mobility Plan rather than petitions that historically drew disproportionate requests from better-resourced neighborhoods.
Council members also asked about budget implications if assessments are removed entirely. Staff said removing assessments does not by itself increase sidewalk funding; separate budget or capital-reserve decisions would be needed to expand the number of projects completed each year. Kimbrell said staff will return with the Active Mobility Plan updates and proposals for prioritization and funding options.
Councilor Lambert Melton said he would be willing to move the staff recommendation; the council gave direction for staff to return the matter as a regular-agenda item for formal action at a future meeting on September 2. No formal vote was taken at the work session.
What remains unresolved are specific legal questions counsel must review about past projects for which payments were collected and how staff will administratively process refunds and title records. Staff estimated the refunds at roughly $200,000 across the 17 pending projects (with a separate $180,000 figure tied to one option that would rescind assessments only on eight CIP projects). Kimbrell emphasized that changes to assessment rates would shift more cost to property owners and that current rates do not meaningfully recover staff administrative costs.
Next steps: staff will return the recommended rescissions and refund authorization as a formal agenda item for council action and will bring Active Mobility Plan updates that will include prioritization criteria and funding recommendations for sidewalks and street improvements.
