Increasing City Fees as a Symptom of a Flawed Land-Use Model

A few weeks back, I wrote about how walkability for all of us, but especially for seniors who may be less secure on their feet, relies on all homeowners maintaining their own lengths of sidewalk.

A regular reader responded to me, agreeing with the post, but noting that she’s delaying needed repairs to her section of sidewalk because of the City of Petaluma fees.  In her words, “I suspect that Petaluma sees the permitting process as a means of replenishing city coffers with minimum effort on their part …”

I’m sympathetic to her concern and wouldn’t be surprised to find that the average City cost to oversee a sidewalk repair project is less than the scheduled fee.  However, I think there is something more fundamental at work than maximizing revenue.  And it’s something that we should understand if we wish our communities to function better.

As I noted in the earlier post, the ability of a resident to accomplish an errand on foot depends not just on a well-repaired sidewalk in front of his home, but also well-repaired sidewalks in front of every home between his home and his destination.  Given that need, the resident has an economic incentive for his neighbors to maintain their sidewalks.

To me, that incentive is intuitive.  As a result, if a neighbor knocked on my front door, asking for a contribution toward his city fees for a sidewalk repair, I’d be tempted to participate.  (Assuming, of course, that I could establish that the request wasn’t an innovative scam.)

But it’s neither reasonable nor effective for every homeowner to wander his neighborhood with donation can in hand every time a sidewalk repair is needed.

So what developed instead was the communal sharing of sidewalk repair fees through the mechanism that best met the need, local taxes.  For many years, some small portion of our local taxes went to toward paying a portion of the city costs for sidewalk repairs.  When we paid our taxes, we were reducing the fees to our neighbors and thereby helping them make the repairs needed to sustain our own walkability.

I doubt the many folks ever specifically argued for reduced sidewalk fees as a way to maintain community walkability.  Instead, it was a right-thinking cultural intuition that became embedded in city fee schedules.  It was a fair and reasonable system.

But, as happens too often to fair and reasonable systems, it didn’t survive.  When Howard Jarvis made his wrong-headed decision in the late 1970s that taxes were high, not because of a flawed land-use paradigm, but because government was inefficient, an unintended, but nonetheless clear, part of the message sent to city halls was the public no longer wished to contribute toward the sidewalk fees for their neighbors.

The city halls heard the message.  In the scramble to find ways to balance the books in the decades since the passage of Proposition 13 and its offspring in other states, fees for approvals such as sidewalk repair have crept upward to include the full charge for all city costs associated with the repairs.  And, in many cases, have likely exceeded the true costs as city officials found squinty-eyed ways to look at the data in their desperate search for loose nickels.

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs.

However, there is a solution.  Moving toward a more urban land-use pattern offers a three-pronged solution.  First, greater density means that the same infrastructure, such as sidewalks, serves more people, allowing the repair costs to be spread more widely.

Second, if households are able to reduce their costs for automobile, which can be a surprisingly large chunk of a household budget, more funds are available to assist with neighborhood needs such as sidewalk repairs.

Third, the increased mingling in the public realm builds good feelings for other community members, increasing the willingness to share expenses.

All that remains to be done is to commit to a transition to a more urbanist world.  And then get started on sidewalk maintenance.

Next time, I’ll offer a few final pre-election thoughts on Petaluma’s Measure Q before the polls open.  I expect that the thoughts will have applicability to tax measures on many local ballots.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Public Officials Offer Hint of Urbanist Progress

Despite my roles of civic participant, consultant, and blogger, I don’t spend a lot of time chatting with public officials.  However, occasional opportunities come my way.  I had a couple of recent conversations that are worth sharing.

One conversation was explicitly off-record.  The same restriction wasn’t placed on the other conversation, but I understood an implicit expectation that I wouldn’t share the information with too much specificity.  Luckily, I needn’t offer names or quote exact words to highlight the key observation.

In the first conversation, a public official expressed frustration that some of his colleagues aren’t more willing to accept the environmental tradeoffs that come with more dense, urban-type development.

In the second conversation, a different public official acknowledged that he believed in induced traffic (the theory that traffic will expand to fill new roads, making traffic relief an impossible goal) and that the only fair and reasonable response to induced traffic was to offer development incentives for walkable settings.  The public official also cautioned that the general public would neither accept the first point nor acquiesce to the logic of the second.

Both positions, of course, are straight from the urbanist playbook and were welcome to my ears.

Knowing only what I’ve written above, one might assume that the two public officials are closely aligned in their political positions.  But that assumption would be wrong.  When there is a split vote, the two are often on opposing sides.  And there is a rumor of antipathy between the two.  They’re not political allies.

And that’s the point that opened my eyes.  Public officials from across the political spectrum are coming around to urbanism.  The game is far from won, but movement toward the goal line is a good sign.

There isn’t always a good feedback loop for bloggers.  I can see readership tallies, but I don’t know to what extent readers are agreeing with what I’ve written.  It’s exciting to have a couple of public officials indicate that they’re listening to the arguments and coming around to an urbanist way of thinking.

I’m not claiming that I’m personally responsible for their evolving attitudes.  There are many who write about urbanism with more clarity and élan.   I’m just happy to be on the team that is gradually gaining ground.

Before closing, I should comment on what the second public official said about the public not being ready to accept urbanism realities.  When I repeated the words to my wife, she was distressed, asking “So nothing is going to change?”

I appreciate her concern, but I also understand the position of the public official.  Grasping an emerging truth is difficult for public officials.  They can publicly espouse their new beliefs and risk not being re-elected, relegating their new convictions to the sidelines, or they can keep their comments off-record and work for small incremental changes in their public actions.  I understand the logic of the latter and intellectually concur with it, but it’s an approach I’d struggle to follow.  (It’s a good thing that I’m not a public official.)

The underlying problem is that we elect public officials who we expect to act in lockstep with our under-informed but firmly held opinions.  I’ve argued that we should elect public officials whose thought processes we respect and that we should value their decisions when they use the depth of information available to them to move in new and unexpected directions.  But my opinion on this point is underrepresented within the electorate.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t support democracy.  It has its shortcomings, most of which are the result of our own shortcomings, but it’s still the best option we have.  As Winston Churchill said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  (Just to make sure that everyone understood his perspective, Churchill also said “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”)

And so we muddle along in our democracy, moving slowly toward urbanism.  And being heartened when public officials with disparate belief systems find common ground in urbanist logic.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net