Street, light maintenance leads to Columbia Falls tax increase

By NANCY KIMBALL

The Daily Inter Lake

Columbia Falls taxpayers will see an increase in their November 2006 and May 2007 tax bills.

The city council Monday night approved a pair of resolutions stepping up street maintenance and street lighting assessments in the coming year. It also redefined the area included in the city s street maintenance district to include new subdivisions.

The smallest of the two increases is the street lighting assessment.

That pays electricity and maintenance costs for street lights, figured at $33,000 for the 2006-07 fiscal year. It is close to the amount collected in 2003-04, when the city received $32,500 from neighborhoods where street lights are installed. Cash carryovers the following two years helped the city cut assessments to $31,500 in 2004-05 and $27,500 in 2005-06.

Lighting is assessed at 15.11 cents per front foot of property.

The street maintenance assessment went up considerably more, from $234,813 last year to $258,260 in the coming year. The 10 percent jump represents the first street maintenance rate increase since the 2000 fiscal year.

Rate increases the following two years will be five percent each year.

On an individual tax bill, the increases translate to $1.28 more per 1,000 square feet of assessed property in the coming three years.

In 2005-06, the rate was $5.99 per 1,000 square feet. In 2006-07 it will be $6.59, in 2007-08 it will be $6.92, and in 2008-09 it will be $7.27.

Cost for a 10,000 square-foot lot would increase from about $60 a year to $73 by 2008-09.

At that rate, the city should be able to afford about $150,000 in improvement projects for existing streets assuming very little snow plowing and no added labor.

To keep up with a typical asphalt street s 35-year life span, City Manager Bill Shaw said the city should overlay about 16 blocks a year. In current dollars, that would cost about $170,000.

Even with the increases, Shaw said street improvements are restricted primarily by burgeoning asphalt prices. Last year, the city could not even get a bid price to do its usual summer street overlay work. This year, he said, the price had jumped by 30 percent.

Shaw said the city would see a $3,500 increase in its share of the assessments, and the Columbia Falls school district would pay about $5,000 more. To mitigate the impact, he suggested the council might want to consider an exemption allowed by state law that reduces or eliminates the assessment on developed open space that is used primarily for recreation.

In other action, the council:

n Indicated intent to amend the Cedar Creek Reservoir land-sales resolution of 2005 allowing a specific exemption to the ban on building on slopes greater than 25 percent.

A city-commissioned road study shows the only feasible access for a 122-acre parcel west of the North Fork Road is a road built across slopes steeper than 25 percent. One of the three benches on the rugged land could be reached by building a separate road on the west side that would cross Cedar Creek.

But that road could be stopped in the conservation and flood-plain permitting process, and the potential buyer wants assured access. He has offered the full $495,000 asking price.

The agenda item had been added at the beginning of the meeting, without public notice. Action will be scheduled for the next council meeting, allowing time for public input.

Two other Cedar Creek parcels already have sold a 13-acre strip along the North Fork Road, sold to James Quessenberry who owns land immediately behind that strip; and a 175-acre tract on three sides of the reservoir, sold to Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Underdahl for a private estate.

n Authorized City Manager Bill Shaw to work out arrangements with local banks to help owners of annexed property connect to city sewer. The initial deadline to connect was spring 2005, but the cost burden prompted the city to impose a moratorium until Aug. 15, 2006, while it looked for ways to help about 40 low- and fixed-income residents. No grants were found, but Shaw reached tentative agreement with Glacier Bank to either have the city guarantee loans or pay the interest for what has shrunk to about 25 residents now. Freedom Bank pledged to follow the arrangement, too.