The year before we bought our home our street was rebuilt. It’s been 11 years now and I don’t remember the precise value, but I believe we incorporated a number close to $11,000 into the purchase of the house sale price we paid which related directly to the special assessment. We were first-time homebuyers and didn’t know there was any other way of doing business. We just thought that when a new road gets poured in front of your home, you pay for a portion of it relative to the width of your lot.
Fast Forward to today, and this topic is getting a lot of attention again. Actually, it seems to be a topic that Council has kicked around since at least 2017 with little change. On December 12th of last year Councilman Ford put forth a special assessment deferment program similar to this one in Eau Claire. He wisely noted that, “At the very least it allows us to provide a real option that has precedent in Wisconsin for residents who are facing a loss of their home due to a special assessment.” Having something like this in our city would be beneficial to residents who would be priced out of their homes if a special assessment were too costly for them. No citizen should fear losing their home because they can’t pay for a city road being built in front of their property.
Further developments came at the last council meeting on January 9th. The discussion began at 24:20 during that Council meeting. What’s being proposed is a $35 per vehicle wheel tax (municipal only). This is officially known as a Vehicle Registration Fee, but more commonly known as a wheel tax. The DOT needs a 90-day lead-in to implement this plan, assuming Council approves the change to this model at the end of February, and it could go into effect midsummer.
Let me highlight my stance here: I am entirely behind this change replacing special assessments with a wheel tax. This fee of $35, or whatever Council approves this year, will be added to your annual vehicle registration fee. That dollar amount comes from the total of revenue lost from special assessments divided by the estimated number of registered vehicles in the municipality. Everyone drives on the roads, so now everyone would be paying something to maintain them instead of having a massive burden fall on a property owner when that shoe drops. Yes, it’s one more fee that you have to pay. Yes, people will argue that it’s more taxation by a different name. But let’s face it, those same people (along with myself) are sick of so many of the crappy roads we have in Oshkosh. We need money to repair the roads that we all drive on, and this new system is more fair and logical than what we’ve had up to this point.
The wheel tax is not perfect, but my goodness it’s better than getting sacked with a huge special assessment. As I understand it, because of the way this is written into state law we cannot adjust the fee to be proportional to the size of the car. In an ideal world your Prius might pay $15 while every 18-wheeler going to and from Walmart would pay $150. Those numbers are imaginary, but you get the point I’m trying to make. City Manager Rohloff is “going on tour” over the next six weeks to talk with various community groups about these proposed changes. I encourage you to engage with him to understand the changes being outlined for the Council to vote on.
On a related topic, I had a lovely meeting with Mayor Lang and members of her staff at Neenah City Hall earlier this month. A big part of my campaign is speaking with and learning from other municipalities. One of the things we discussed at length was actually special assessments. At the end of the last decade, they moved away from special assessments as well, but instead of opting for a wheel tax they went with a transportation assessment replacement fee, or TARF for short. You can read the FAQ here. In short, this replaces special assessments with a nominal fee around that $35 like our proposed wheel tax, but whereas a wheel tax is is a charge against a registered vehicle, the TARF is a charge against a property based on the number of equivalent runoff units on the property.
I liked this model a lot when they explained it to me and I wondered why Oshkosh hadn’t done something like this before. Their TARF even charges more for commercial buildings - up to a cap of $2000, I believe, which is fair in my eyes - charge the bigger commercial giants more than the smaller homeowner properties. And that’s probably a reason why an idea like this didn’t fly here in the past. Certain entities like the Chamber likely advocated against this on behalf of the commercial sector. I understand that side of the argument, too, and I don’t blame them if this speculation was actually the case.
Regardless of what led to the stagnant quagmire that bogged down any change to our special assessments for so long, the time has finally come for something new. I’m excited that it’s happening. We all use the roads. Let’s all bear the burden.
