Recently, the Bend City Council received an email from a concerned grandparent. Their grandkids attend school less than a mile from their home, but do not feel safe walking to school because the sidewalk along their route disappears before they reach a crosswalk. Could we help?

It’s the city’s job to build and maintain a transportation system that’s safe enough for kids to walk to school. Filling a sidewalk gap seems simple, but it requires paying for materials, equipment, and workers to do the job. And what happens when those costs increase, but the amount of money the city has available to pay for them decreases? It’s also the city’s job to plan for and fill that funding gap. Filling the gap between our fiscal reality and our community’s needs and expectations is a responsibility taken seriously by your City Council, and it’s why we spent over a year working on a transportation fee policy.

This is not a new policy discussion in Bend. For many years, city staff and leaders have known that we needed additional revenue to take care of maintaining our streets, sidewalks, and intersections. Our transportation system is an expensive asset to maintain, and when we defer maintenance and roads start to fail, costs can increase exponentially. Community stakeholder committees in 2009 and 2011 recommended implementation of a transportation fee, which over 30 cities in Oregon now have. But past Councils said no, kicking the can down the road and attempting a fractious gas tax vote that failed resoundingly in 2016.

Finally, in 2020, Council approved a Transportation System Plan (TSP) that clearly accounted for our future funding needs, and identified the transportation fee as a key component of that funding plan. Key was the fact that money from a general obligation bond, like the one voters passed in 2020, could not be spent on maintenance, operations, or safety programs.

Council set goals in 2021 and 2023 to follow through on our TSP funding plan and implement the fee. After over a year of work sessions, roundtables, committee presentations, neighborhood town halls, and listening sessions, we approved a Transportation Fee policy this past week.

City staff have spent countless hours researching, coordinating, and providing information to Council and the public. We have responded to as many community concerns as possible while balancing our duty as fiscal stewards of the city’s core functions. Some of the policy impacts of public input have been: phasing the fee to lessen the immediate financial impact on households and businesses, ensuring we have a financial assistance program for low-income residents, transparency measures like annual reporting and a frequently updated data dashboard, applying the fee to short-term rentals, and commitment to updating our TSP and discussing other revenue sources before the Transportation Fee is fully phased in. Our commitments are part of the fee ordinance, which you can read here.

It’s clear the people of Bend want a transportation system that works well for everyone. We won’t get there if we don’t have the revenue to fill our funding gap. A transportation fee is an imperfect tool, but the city can no longer let perfect be the enemy of progress. We know residents want more safety, better snowplowing and maintenance, connected sidewalks, a complete cycling network, and better transit. With the approval of the fee, we’re closer to achieving those goals. We’ll also keep working on ways to capture visitor impact. Council will discuss by early 2026 the possibility of referring a gas tax to voters, which could be applied on weekends or seasonally.

We didn’t wait to help those grandkids get to school — their sidewalk gap has been filled — but many more remain. The city remains committed to using every tool available to fill the gaps, on the street or in our budget, so we can make sure everyone in Bend can get where they need to go safely.