Item 5: Ordinance Levying Assessments for West University Alleys

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that the procedure for assessments be governed by general ordinance. I In this case the Charge-Out Rates may not be used for assessment since they were set by Administrative Orders of the City Manager, and not by the general ordinance of the City Council. See Administrative Order Nos. 58-04-14-F and 58-05-07-F for Charge-Out Rates effective for FY2004-2005 and FY 2005-2006, respectively. Exs. 2 and 3. Second, the Orders indicate that the rates were set pursuant to Eugene Code 2.020. However, Code 2.020 indicates that fees are to be set based, not solely upon "actual cost" as required by the Oregon Constitution, but upon policies, enactments and directives of City Council, the amount charged by the City in the past, the full costs of providing the services, the amounts charged by comparable providers, the revenue needs of the City as determined by the budget and the hourly rates of engineering employees. Code 2.020 (2). The Orders expressly state that they were based upon these factors. Exs. 2 and 3. They were thus not based solely upon "actual cost." Third, the Orders setting the Charge-Out Rates indicate that they were for purposes of complying with Code 7.130. which is specifically only for engineering costs where the City does not provide the engineering for the proiect, unlike the alley projects, where the City provided the engineering for the project. ("The city engineer shall charge a fee set pursuant to section 2.020 of this code to cover the costs, including overhead, of engineering, inspection and review services performed by the city on all private or public improvements not engineered by the city. ") d) City has not supported its claim for the Engineering Charge with evidence of actual costs consisting of wages or wages plus benefits for City engineering staff classifications, with the hours billed for each classification as part of the alley project. Therefore, the entire Engineering Charge of $509,380.59 used as part of the overall assessment should be deleted from the calculations. There is no evidence in the record of actual costs of the time of city engineering staff, and the assessment therefore should not include costs of such time. If this reduction is applied to the assessment at 566 E. 18th, the new assessment would be reduced by roughly $4,545.41 to $11,403.40. e) This writer has not been able to obtain timely adequate information as to hourly wages and benefits of City engineering staff classifications and the hours billed for each classification on this alley project, so as to allow calculation of the actual costs of wages and benefits for the project. See discussion below. However, some information has been provided to allow some rough estimation of the impact ofthe City's failure to base the assessment on actual costs of wages. For example, as of May, 2004, the average charge-out rate for all engineering classifications was $74.38. Ex. 2 (Charge-out rates were increased as of July 1,2005, Ex I The Eugene City Charter, section 38, provides that "[t]he procedure for levying, collecting and enforcing the payment of special assessments for public improvements shall be governed by general ordinance." Section 39 provides that amendments to such ordinance requires 2/3's vote of the City council, and that "such amendment may not take effect for six months after the council adopts it and may not apply to an improvement authorized by the council before the effective date of the amendment." -;)..--