Fort Worth is closer to establishing a fee that would help pay for the annual maintenance of the city’s streets.
The city has looked into solutions for years, most recently in 2025 when it looked into adding a maintenance fee that would help fund what officials estimate could be up to $100 million in annual maintenance costs.
Now, Fort Worth is continuing to study the feasibility of a monthly fee based on traffic generation and usage. Single-family residents would pay $3 per month under a proposal the City Council and staff are looking into. Council members, briefed by staff members and a consultant on Tuesday, appeared amenable.
“I think most people, when it’s explained, are in agreement, because streets are our No. 1 priority,” council member Deborah Peoples, whose east Fort Worth district stretches from Stop Six to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, said during the briefing.
Fort Worth residents have long viewed street maintenance as a top priority and as the service they view as most lacking, according to the city.
The city has $98 million in average annual street maintenance needs, staff estimated. The city pays for about a third of that from property tax revenues. The remaining $66 million gap means many streets continue to deteriorate until they eventually need to be replaced under one of the city’s bond programs that go before voters, city officials said.
“That is a very large funding gap,” Lane Zarate, assistant director of street and stormwater operations in the Fort Worth Transportation & Public Works Department, told council members Tuesday. “It’s not easy to solve through traditional means.”
The proposed fee would generate another $27.4 million in annual revenue for street maintenance, based on a study conducted for the city by Fort Worth-based consulting and engineering firm Freese and Nichols.
That would fill only part of the funding gap, but it would increase street maintenance 50% annually and allow the city to touch every street once every five years, Zarate told the council. For every $1 million the city spends on maintenance, it can avoid spending $4.8 million in future street reconstruction, she added.
“Maintenance has a very high return on investment,” Zarate said.
Freese and Nichols generated the proposed fee by estimating vehicle miles generated by users in 15 categories, including single-family and multifamily dwellers and various commercial and institutional users. Single and multifamily together would generate about 40% of the revenue from the new fee.
The fee for apartment buildings would be generated by multiplying the number of rooms by the estimate of vehicle miles driven by users.
Commercial and institutional user fees would be calculated by dividing a building’s gross square footage by a 1,000-square-foot “development unit” and then multiplying that number by estimated vehicle miles driven for a specific category. In one of the city’s examples, the operator of a 45,333-square-foot church would pay a monthly fee of $64.37, based on the average-miles-driven rate of $1.42 for a religious building.
The fee, if approved by City Council this summer, would go into effect in 2028 and be consolidated into water billing when a new software program is launched that year.
The money would not go into streets that already need to be rebuilt. Repair on those would be included in a bond package. The city maintains about 8,600 lane miles of streets, including 3,616 that are in good condition but need to be preserved, 2,885 in fair condition that need heavier maintenance, and 2,119 that are in poor shape.
Council member Michael Crain wondered whether an exemption could be created for small businesses.
“I think there’s an area of refinement that might make sense to do,” Crain said during the discussion. “We may need to look at small businesses a bit differently.”
“That is a policy decision,” Zarate said, suggesting the council seek a legal opinion.
It could set a precedent for other user fees, she said. It would also lower revenue generated by the fee and likely create additional administrative costs in order to generate the datasets for such an exemption.
Council member Charles Lauersdorf, who represents a district in far north Fort Worth, noted his district includes a lot of newer roads and others in fair condition — but not many in poor condition.
“A lot of residents (in his district) may not realize how bad it is in other areas,” Lauersdorf said. To ensure residents across the city understand the depth of the problem, “I think communication is going to be key.”
Lauersdorf also asked if it was possible to create an exemption for school districts, which make up 0.3% of the proposed fee revenue.
“Our school districts are already suffering,” he said. “I would like to see if there’s a way to exempt the ISDs.”
Scott Nishimura is senior editor for local government accountability and a Fort Worth City Hall reporter at the Fort Worth Report. Reach him at scott.nishimura@fortworthreport.org.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
