Agenda - Council Work Session - 05/12/2020

Home

Road Funding Mechanisms for Small Suburban Cities in the Twin Cities Metro Area Humphrey School of Public Affairs Resilient Communities Project The City of Ramsey By: David Ambuel, Sean Crawford, Steven Kutz, and Molly Sir ABSTRACT The City of Ramsey is currently wearing down their roads faster than they are able to fund their maintenance and construction. The current funding structure involves special assessments of the roughly 178 miles of road in the City of Ramsey, 142 miles of road are outside of the Municipal State -Aid Street system (MSAS) designation, and therefore are ineligible for certain state aid funds and rely solely on city funding for their upkeep. In light of this, the City of Ramsey is investigating ways to sustainably fund road reconstruction and maintenance projects and has partnered with the University of Minnesota's Resilient Communities Project to advance this investigation. This report examines how other comparable cities are funding their road maintenance programs and presents recommendations, comparisons, for the City of Ramsey to apply in their own road funding context. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the City of Ramsey as well as the Resilient Communities Project for the opportunity to work on such an exciting and relevant project. Thank you for providing us with ample feedback and information throughout the project and for your openness and willingness to answer all of our questions. Additionally we would like to thank Professor Greta Friedemann- Sanchez and Sarah Carroll for the feedback and advice on our research project throughout the semester, which has helped us to revise and improve our final product to make it the most valuable it can be. Finally, we would like to thank the city staff that agreed to have a discussion about road funding during a chaotic and uncertain time and when other matters could have easily taken priority. Thank you for your time. This report would not exist without your participation.