Kennedy: Service fee likely dead; Mon commissioner: ‘Back to square one’

Backers of the road service fee say that they don’t have many good options to pay for roads after the fee was soundly defeated Saturday.

Monongalia County Commission President Bob Bell said the fee was the only tool the commission had to put local money toward roads. He said local leaders proposed a number of options, ranging from increasing the gasoline tax to starting a county sales tax, but they were not accepted by the state.

He said that unless the state Legislature offers alternatives, the county is unlikely to propose another fee to put in front of voters.

“We’ll certainly look for funding sources, but at this point, that’s going to be tough,” Bell said. “I don’t think it will come up for another vote again, let’s put it that way. [We’re] back to square one.”

County Commissioner John Pyles, who opposed the service fee, said a variety of funding sources need to be examined. He said that maybe lottery money could be used for roads, or the state could get more federal road dollars.

Pyles said the project list should be changed to include ideas such as an elevated bypass over the railtrail downtown, which could save on land acquisition costs. He also said there should be more mass transit and a park-and-ride for commuters.

“We need to get some more public input on this to see what people would accept,” Pyles said. “We certainly don’t want to burden the lower-income people who are having trouble making ends meet as it is.”

One important factor in considering funding sources should be whether the county can sell bonds with the money, county Commissioner Asel Kennedy said. He said one problem with impact fees on development is that they aren’t uniform, so they can’t be used to pay back bonds.

But Kennedy said that without the service fee, he doesn’t know where money for road construction will come from. He said the Legislature could come back with another source of funding to try.

“I thought it was worth a shot,” Kennedy said. “It turned out people don’t want it at all. If the Legislature can come up with something else, we would take it back out to the people to see what they’re interested in.”

Chet Parsons, director of the Greater Morgantown Metropolitan Planning Organization, said the group will talk about what to do next at its meeting this month. Parsons said there probably won’t be any more funding proposals this year.

“We still have the plan, we know what projects we need to fund, we just need to find a way to do it,” Parsons said. “I’m going to look for direction from the policy board and then we’ll see what the next step is.”

State Sen. Mike Oliverio, DMonongalia, said the fee failure means the county will have to “go back to the drawing board.”

Oliverio said he doesn’t see much money coming from the state. He said the local delegation has done its job in getting state funding, most notably with the Mon-Fayette Expressway, but the money for new roads is locked in for the next several years.

“What I heard from the voters was one of two things: either they don’t think traffic is a problem ... or they were saying that this isn’t the way to fund it,” Oliverio said. “At this point, it would just be a matter of holding out hope that some other plan can be developed. That’s our challenge at this point.”

Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, said voters she talked to were concerned about fairness. Primarily, they didn’t like that low-income people would pay the same as higher-income people, and that developers weren’t paying their fair share.

Fleischauer has written a bill — introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jon Blair Hunter — that would allow counties to exempt low-income people from a service fee. The bill also would allow counties to more easily charge impact fees on development and fund mass transit with service-fee money.

Fleischauer said it will be hard to pass the bill through the full Legislature. But she said the local delegation has signed on, and she hopes local residents will support the changes.

“It is a starting point,” Fleischauer said. “We need to hear from voters whether there is support for these ideas.”

Hunter said he introduced the bill to offer a possible alternative for voters who had concerns about the service fee. He said that if the vote were close, local lawmakers might make some changes and try again.

Hunter said that at the time he introduced the bill, he presumed it had already been introduced in the House. Hunter said last week that he didn’t know for sure whether it would affect the service fee proposed in Monongalia County, but that it probably wouldn’t be possible to retroactively change the rules for the vote. Fleischauer confirmed that it would not make any difference for the measure that voters ultimately voted down.

Hunter said that introducing the bill before the vote didn’t have any effect on the outcome. The voters turned down the fee by a wide margin because they didn’t want the service fee in place. Because the vote was so decisive, Hunter said, he is concerned that Fleischauer’s bill might not have a lot of support from local officials or in the Legislature.

“The fact that it was a 4 to 1 vote, there does not seem to be a lot of interest from the local officials ... in putting it on the ballot any time soon,” Hunter said. “... If they’re not interested at the local level of me pursuing it, then I’ll just let it die.”