How much would you pay to fix Fort Worth’s streets? Here’s the city’s proposal
Fort Worth property owners could have another fee tacked onto their monthly water bills — this one to help fix the city’s crumbling streets.
The proposal comes two years after a similar fee was rejected by the City Council over concerns about the cost to residents.
The city’s transportation and public works department argued the fee is needed as more streets every year get added to an ever-growing backlog of roads needing replacement.
The revised proposal — presented at a May 19 City Council work session — would see owners of single-family homes pay $3 per month with owners of other types of property paying different rates based on their impact on the city’s road network.
For example, apartment building owners would pay $1.66 per month for every unit in their building, while large warehouse owners would pay $2.64 per month for every 1,000 square feet of flooring, according to the city’s proposal.
The city’s presentation used the example of a 265 unit apartment complex paying $439.90 per month, while a 1 million square foot Amazon fulfillment center would pay $2,693.59 per month under the city’s proposal.
This proposed fee is designed to be small, predictable, and based on how the city’s road network is used, Transportation and Public Works Director Lauren Prieur said Tuesday at a City Council budget work session.
The fee would double the amount of lane miles the city is able to maintain annually and slow the growing backlog of streets that need to be completely replaced through a bond package, she said.
For reference, a lane mile is one mile of a single lane of road. So, one mile of a four-lane road would be four lane miles.
Of the roughly 8,100 lane miles in the city’s road network, 2,119 need to be replaced, according to the presentation. That’s roughly a quarter of the whole network.
It cost the city roughly $2.5 million per lane mile to replace a street compared to roughly $441,000 over a 40-year period to maintain it, according to the presentation.
Fort Worth budgeted roughly $40 million for the fiscal year maintain the city’s streets, according to a city budget report shared with the Star-Telegram.
That covers 107 lane miles of heavy street maintenance like resurfacing asphalt, and 109 lane miles of preservation like filling in cracks and potholes, according to the report.
Still, that’s not enough to prevent roughly 150 lane miles of roads from deteriorating to the point where they need to be replaced, public works assistant director Lane Zarate told the City Council Tuesday.
This translates to roughly $110 million in deferred maintenance that will ultimately need to be addressed through a bond program, she said, while noting the recently passed 2026 bond package set aside $129 million for reconstruction.
There’s a roughly $66 million gap between what the city spends on maintenance and what it would need to spend, Prieur said.
The proposed fee would generate an additional $27.4 million for maintenance, according to the presentation.
This doesn’t address the whole problem, but is a step in the right direction, City Manager Jay Chapa told the City Council.
If approved by the City Council, the proposed fee wouldn’t go into effect until Spring 2028, Zarate said. This would allow the fee roll out to coincide with a new payment system by the city’s water department, she said.
It would also give the city time to make improvements to the fee structure while also communicating with the public about the need for the new fee.
The City Council is expected to vote on the fee in September at roughly the same time it votes on the budget, and any changes to water, trash and stormwater fees.
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