Transportation Utility Fee: Oregon Experience

Ten Oregon agencies have adopted transportation utility fee (TUF) programs to augment shrinking roadway maintenance revenues. Four additional agencies are investigating the feasibility of TUF programs this year, which would generate about $6,000 per road mile annually through this new mechanism. Clackamas County (population 345,000), in the process of investigating a transportation maintenance fee (TMF) program, will become the largest agency in the state with this type of finance system if the fee is adopted. Initial annual revenue estimates were $20 million for eligible maintenance activities, but these were scaled back to $4.2 million through the public review process. If adopted, this funding shift could provide opportunities to transfer a portion of the gas tax funds to capital project investments, which are substantially underfunded. The TMF development process in Clackamas County included a convergence of traditional travel demand forecasting with near-term traffic impact techniques to create a road user nexus at a parcel level. To accomplish this, trip estimates were done with ITE methods with a cross-check of the regional travel demand model. A major challenge was to make a reasonable assessment of travel activity for every building in the county. Each of the 97,000 residential and 7,000 nonresidential tax lots was evaluated by using tax assessment and state employment records to estimate travel activity and proportionately allocate fees. Lessons learned in this project include the trade-offs between road user fee market value and technical and legal defensibility and justification for better interagency land use data organization.