Ordinance No. 19911 - Laserfiche WebLink

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The City Engineer's Staff has always calculated assessments pursuant to EC 7.175(2}. Under subsection ~2}fib} la~l}~a} the Cade takes into consideration the addi~.onal capacity necessary for a collector street in a residential zoning district by limiting the amount of assessment to a maximum of 20-feet in width. Since collector street improvement projects are always wider than 2a-feet, the additional width is paid for by the City. However, under EC 7.1752}fib} 1 a~Z} the Green Acres property which is in a commercial zoning district would be assessed for a maximum 44-feet in width. Green Acres argues that because extra capacity has been built into the project to accommodate the street as a collector which serves other areas, EC 7.1751}~a} and ~l}~d} require that the City pay all of the cost. Since it had a paved street in front of its property before the project, Green Acres argues that it should only be required to pay for sidewalks and a driveway apron. obviously, if the City were to adopt the approach recommended by Green Acres, the same consideration would have to be given to all other property owners along this development, The financial consequences to the City would be quite substantial. The issue presented by Green Acres involves both legal and policy considerations, First of all, it appears from the City Attorney's Memoranda that the City Council does not have the legal authority to change achy-wide policy unless the alteration occurred prior to the adop~.on of the resolution forming the Local Improvement District SLID}. Since the LID was formed at the time the Council approved the construc~.an of the project, it would be the City Attorney's opinion that the Council no longer has the authority to change the policy as Green Acres has suggested. The Council does not call upon the Hearings Gfficial to offer it legal advice, and the Hearings Ufficial has not separately researched this issue. It should be noted that Green Acres has not offered any rebuttal to the posirion taken by the City Attorney. Setting aside the question of whether the City has the legal authority to revise the assessment policy in light of the fact that the LID has already been formed, there area variety of policy considerations for the Council. For example, does it wish to j ettison EC 7.175 ~2} fib} 1 a~ 1 } ~a} so as to provide that the City would always pay all of the costs associated with the construction of an arterial or collector street? As noted, the Eugene Cade currently takes the additional capacity necessary for a collector street into consideration for a residen~al zoning district by limiting the amount of assessment to a maximum of 20-feet in width. In a commercial zone, a collector is limited to 44-feet for assessments purposes, even though the assessment may be wider, as is true of part of this project. Cdr, would the Council prefer to assess properties based upon aparcel-by parcel assessment of its current contribution to the traffic flow along the proposed improvement? Such an approach would require that the City do a toff c count study throughout the area of the proposed improvement, including the amount of traffic to each of the abutting property owners. Then, once that very considerable amount of data had been collected, the City would have to figure out same process for assessing each individual property based on its current trafaff~c usage, _2-