City staff say voter-approved use tax is funding road repairs and police technology investments

City staff presented a joint engineering and police briefing March 19 describing how the voter-approved 2020 use tax has been allocated to road repairs and police technology.

Engineering manager Chris Klerks told the committee the city dedicates use-tax revenues through the budget process and typically splits available funds roughly 50/50 between pavement programs and police needs. "Residents approved this use tax back in 2020," Klerks said, and the city has used the funds for concrete pavement, asphalt one-time investments, and a growing partial depth repair (PDR) program designed to repair targeted joints without replacing full slabs.

Klerks said the use tax has supported about $11 million in pavement-related work since the program began and that in recent years it contributed roughly $2 million annually to the pavement program. He described PDR (hot-applied mastic, sometimes called Techrete) as a cost-effective technique for residential streets that increases lane-mile coverage and preserves concrete slabs when joints are the primary failure mode.

Major Derek Myers, assistant police chief, described how the police department used its share of the use tax for communications and public-safety technology. "This use tax has really been a fundamental transformation for what we do as a police department," Myers said. He listed investments funded in whole or part by use-tax dollars: regional radio interoperability, 911 system maintenance, body and dash cameras, an automated license-plate reader system (Flock), computer-aided dispatch and records systems, drones and equipment for investigations, accreditation work (CALEA), training simulators, take-home vehicle programs and related vehicle replacements.

Myers said the automated plate-reading system has about 40 cameras in city deployment. He described the system as an investigative tool that compares plates against local, state and national databases and retains raw plate-read data for 30 days; staff said preservation processes exist for major criminal cases. He emphasized privacy protections and departmental rules about access: "the data is purged after 30 days," he said, but preservation options exist if required for prosecution.

Committee members questioned collection mechanics, forecasting and whether the use tax replaced prior road-fund commitments. Staff said it is collected as a sales tax (extending taxation to previously untaxed sales such as certain online/commercial transactions), that finance forecasts revenues and that the city has continued to contribute prior Street Road Improvement Fund dollars (roughly $2 million) with use tax on top of that amount.

The presentation did not propose new policy changes; committee members requested continued transparency on allocations and the city said it will continue reporting and forecasting through finance staff.