Bend advisors review first run of phase 2 transportation-fee model; staff seek policy direction

City staff presented the first public run of a phase 2 transportation-fee model at the Bend Economic Development Advisory Board meeting on March 3, showing how business-registration data, NAICS-to-ITE trip-generation mapping and nonresidential utility account square footage combine to produce a six-bin fee structure and sample monthly bills.

"So this is the, the next round of discussions around phase 2 of the transportation fee," said Russ Grayson, chief operations officer, as he opened the presentation. Sarah Hudson, senior policy analyst, described the modeling workflow: layer business-registration NAICS codes onto ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) trip rates, collapse fine-grained NAICS categories into broader bins and multiply by thousand-square-foot units on the nonresidential utility account.

Why it matters: the transportation fee is intended to supply a portion of the city's transportation revenue target that staff say will total about $10 million annually, with $4.7 million to be recovered from nonresidential accounts. How the nonresidential burden is distributed will determine which businesses see the largest bills and how much cost is passed to consumers and tenants.

What staff showed

- Dataset and compliance: staff said 40% of nonresidential utility accounts lack an active business registration. To improve modeling coverage they temporarily used inactive registration records and third-party commercial real-estate analytics; the current model run represents roughly 80% of accounts.

- Bins and mapping: staff proposed a bin structure that groups uses by trip rates from the ITE manual and overall square-foot distribution. The draft scenario used six bins, with the…