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Fuel Prices Chipping At Road Paving Fund

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 7, 2008

The bank account Pasco County has used for years to underwrite neighborhood road paving projects is shrinking rapidly, a victim of higher oil prices, the county's chief financial officer said recently.

The falling fund could mean two things for people who live on crumbling roads: The county could cut the number of paving projects to match its funds, or it could pass on more of the costs to residents.

A third option would be to rebuild the fund by shifting other money into it - a plan that likely would shift the pain to another part of the county's infrastructure, county officials say.

When it was sent up a decade ago, the fund had about $13 million. That figure stayed fairly stable until 2006, when rising costs began burning through the account at about $2 million a year, Mike Nurrenbrock, the county's Office of Management and Budget director told county commissioners last week.

Today the fund's closer to $5 million and projected to be about $4.7 million next year, Nurrenbrock said.
County Administrator John Gallagher said last week the fund is unlikely to drop all the way to zero, but it could be significantly smaller than it has been in the past unless county commissioners rebuild it.

The county paves residential streets at the request of residents, who are required to pick up the tab for the work through assessments on their property.

The paving fund picks up the difference between original cost estimates - the basis for residents' assessments - and the actual costs after the projects are finished, sometimes as much as a year after the original estimate.

In the fund's early days, that difference was typically small. Lately, those cost gaps have widened as higher oil prices pushed up the price of asphalt, Nurrenbrock said.

When they set up the paving fund in 1998, county officials built it out of a combination of local-option gas taxes, interest on investments and payments homeowners made on previous paving projects. Shortly thereafter, the gas tax was shunted off to pay for road construction, taking with it the fund's largest source of income.

Since then, the fund has depended on people paying their county-levied paving assessments. That has provided $3 million to $5 million a year, depending on how many people pay their assessments, Gallagher said.

That figure varies in part because people don't always pay their assessments as required. Short of foreclosing on the assessed land to get its money, the county's only option is to place a lien on the property and wait for it to change hands, Gallagher said.

Rebuilding the paving fund could require commissioners to siphon off gas taxes as they did in the past. But that would cut down on money available for road projects. Funding for road work has already taken major hits due to the decline in impact fees paid by new home construction, forcing county officials to drop some projects and shift others farther into the future.

"I would hate to think we'd have to take that money away from road and bridge maintenance to stabilize that fund," Commission Chairman Ted Schrader said. "But that's one option."

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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