Tigard staff and consultants propose trip-generation model for street maintenance fee; council backs working group

City staff and consultant Kittelson & Associates briefed the Tigard City Council on March 4 on plans to update the city’s street maintenance fee methodology, recommending a trip-generation-based approach for nonresidential properties and asking council to approve a stakeholder working group to guide implementation.

Joe Wisniewski, Tigard’s city engineer, said the city’s current methodology—adopted in 2010 and relying for many nonresidential accounts on parking-stall counts—has become difficult to audit and is less appropriate now that parking minimums no longer apply citywide. “The changes that are pending right now we believe are, they won't impact the scope of work or the financial contribution from the city,” Wisniewski told the council when asked whether a short delay would affect the schedule.

Tony Roos of Kittelson & Associates explained four general approaches and recommended a variable fee within class as the balance of equity and administrative practicality. Roos described how the proposed method relies on Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) trip-generation codes assigned to parcels, ranks lots by trip density and places them into a limited number of buckets with progressively higher rates. “Homes generate about 10 trips a day,” Roos said, illustrating that trip generation captures deliveries, waste collection and other uses beyond resident vehicle trips.

Supporters said a trip-based approach more closely aligns fees with use-related pavement wear and accounts for increases in delivery trips since the pandemic. Council members raised questions about residential equity, caps on year-over-year business increases, administrative costs to maintain a large database of tax lots and the number of buckets to use. Staff said the proposal would leave the residential per-unit rate unchanged while overhauling how nonresidential parcels are charged.

Multiple councilors supported forming a stakeholder working group to refine bucket definitions, review implementation logistics with finance and public works, and solicit community feedback before any ordinance change. Staff estimated modest additional meeting costs for a working group but said the principal administrative burden is an upfront data-cleanup task already underway; once buckets are set, assigning a new development to the appropriate bucket would be handled through existing permitting/business-license workflows.

The council did not adopt an ordinance at the meeting; staff will return with more details and an implementation plan after stakeholder engagement.