Agenda - Council Work Session - 05/12/2020

Home

Public Affairs to survey road funding mechanisms in cities comparable to Ramsey, focusing on ways cities sustainably fund roads into the future4. STUDY OBJECTIVES While the literature offers extensive review of the types of funding methods available to cities, further research needs to be done on the mechanisms that are currently being adopted by suburban cities in the seven -county metro of the Twin Cities. Further research also needs to be done that compares the funding mechanisms between suburban cities and identifies themes to explain those differences. Our study focuses on two questions: 1.) How are comparable cities funding their roads? 2.) What road funding options would make the most sense for the City of Ramsey? Given the urgency and novelty of this research, our report aims to provide the city with examples of how comparable cities fund road maintenance and reconstruction projects as well as provide them recommendations for which funding strategies may be best suited in the context of Ramsey. Obiective 1: Survey and interview city managers and engineers to document the range and nature (e.g. franchise fees, property taxes, general revenue, special revenues, political feasibility, and community engagement efforts) of sustainable road funding mechanisms in suburban cities in the Twin -Cities Metro Region. Obiective 2: Understand why cities fund the way they do to better assess how various options may fit into the context of Ramsey. METHODOLOGY Data Sources This research comes from a collection of data sources: government memos and reports provided to us by the City of Ramsey detailing their planning efforts in regards to local road maintenance and reconstruction from 2013 and 2019; budget reports obtained from the Minnesota State Auditor's office summarizing city road maintenance and reconstruction budgets; informal interviews with experts in local road funding practices in Minnesota from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the League of Minnesota Cities; informal interviews and conversations with the City Administrator of the City of Ramsey; and, semi -structured interviews with City Administrators, Managers, or Engineers from eight comparable cities in Minnesota. From the documents, we gained an understanding of the current trends in local road funding. The documents also gave us important data to consider each cities' local road expenditures. While the documents gave us some road funding information, the interviews filled in the gaps for funding sources not 4 For a funding stream to be sustainable it means that it will responsibly and adequately cover the costs associated with the upcoming years of maintenance and road construction projects (Table 2).