Fort Worth is considering a new fee on homeowners, businesses to pay for better roads

Fort Worth officials this week floated the possibility of levying a new fee on property owners to maintain the city’s crumbling roads.

Analysts with the Transportation and Public Works department pitched the creation of a “street maintenance fee” during a city council working session Tuesday. The toll, already implemented in 12 other Texas cities, would charge properties for their “proportional use” of the road system.

Fort Worth’s blistering growth has strained the city’s road infrastructure. New houses need new streets; more cars mean more wear on existing roads. City planners worry that current funding streams for road maintenance will run dry given demographic and budgetary trends. A new fee, they argue, could help.

“The challenge that we have is that this target keeps moving on us, both with growth and population increase,” Lane Zarate, assistant director of the transportation department, told council members during a presentation. “This population increase results in additional development, additional assets that we need to maintain, and more demand for services citywide.”

The city’s road network tangles and sprawls for 8,135 lane-miles. Just under a quarter of city streets “need reconstruction,” according to city data, and around 38% need maintenance. Most of Fort Worth’s shoddier streets are concentrated inside the Interstate 820 loop.

The city set aside $28.3 million in cash for road renovations in its latest budget. It often banks on bonds to fund more intensive rebuilds and redesigns.

City transportation experts warn the current pool of “pay-as-you-go” funds can only bankroll touch-ups for 30% of roads in “vital” need—those on the brink of deteriorating to the point where pricier reconstruction is necessary.

“Our current maintenance funding is not sufficient to prevent deterioration,” Zarate noted. “The impact of deferred maintenance and underfunding maintenance reaches everyone in the city, not just where we currently have the worst conditioned streets in our network.”

Public displeasure with Fort Worth roads is widespread. Just over 60% of residents are dissatisfied with road maintenance in their neighborhoods, according to the 2023 Fort Worth Community Survey; slightly more are peeved about the condition of city streets.

City planners proposed exacting a monthly maintenance fee on properties to stave off greater decay. Different building types would receive different monthly bills, scaled to how much traffic (and, in turn, road damage) they produce.

According to the preliminary fee plan shared by researchers, single-family homes would be assessed $9.22 a month; multifamily residences would pay $5.65 per unit each month. Office, retail and dining spaces would fork over $9.08, $12.06 and $15.80 for every 1,000 square feet of space, respectively. Analysts estimate the initiative would raise roughly $66.1 million annually, easing the pace and scale of road rot.

When presented with the plan, some council members waxed skeptical.

“That’s going to be a hard sell for me to take back to my residents,” said Elizabeth Beck of District 9. “We’re proposing to levy an additional fee on our residents, our single-family homeowners, our businesses that exist today, when we don’t make developers pay for the actual cost of their development.”

Fort Worth developers first began paying a “transportation impact fee” in 2008 to help offset the hefty costs of expanding transportation infrastructure around new developments. But for years, the city offered developers generous discounts to incentivize new construction, often leaving future homeowners and businesses to foot much of the bill. In 2022, city leaders bumped up the proportion of road construction fees developers had to cover from 30% to 50% for new residential properties (significantly less than the 80% threshold staff had recommended).

Others on the council shared Beck’s reluctance to charge property owners more for road maintenance.

“We’re sprawling as a city, which is creating this cycle where we may never catch up, even if we’re charging residents and businesses, especially those who are most vulnerable, with an additional fee,” said Jared Williams of District 6. “That makes it harder for them to be able to afford living or doing business in the city of Fort Worth.”

Transportation department officials plan on collecting public feedback on the initiative and circling back with council members in August.