Livability

Bend sells itself on its great “livability” quotient. City promoters tout great restaurants, plentiful shopping, good schools and little traffic.

By any urban standards, Bend doesn’t have much traffic. The city, though, in tandem with the development community, is making sure that traffic becomes congested and downright treacherous throughout the town.

Specifically, the city allows development anywhere without upgrading the infrastructure: roads, water or sewer. Consequently, in spite of the huge boom through the Aughties (2000 to 2007), Bend faces $500 million in urgent infrastructure needs.

Instead of having development pay its fair share for its effect on Bend’s infrastructure, the city had developers pay less than 20 percent for their infrastructure impact on the community. Unfortunately, these nominal impact fees, which are called system development charges (SDCs) in Oregon, are not used for infrastructure upgrades, but rather paying down debt the city has accrued in subsidizing development.

Thanks to the Great Recession, Bend suspended collecting SDCs. The new city council majority, whose 2008 election was bankrolled by the local real estate and builder associations, is determined, against the recommendations of city staff, to eliminate SDCs altogether.

What does this mean? Well, there isn’t likely to be any much-needed road improvements for years. Currently, the city has failed roads on the north end, south end and east side. Reed Market Road, one of the most congested and dangerous roads in Bend, will not see road improvements for another decade even though improvement plans were finalized two years ago.

Thanks to city mishandling of growth along Highway 97 on Bend’s north end, the state has calculated fixing the hazardous gridlocked area to cost between $200 million to $350 million. The 7-mile-long parkway completed earlier this decade cost $120 million.

So, instead of having developers, some of the richest people in the community, help pay for these infrastructure needs, the city is jacking up water/sewer rates and proposing a tax on all citizens to pay for road improvements. In other words, the many will subsidize the few.

In the meantime, the roads will get more congested and more dangerous and the city will do nothing about it.