Trustees to Talk Roads, Taxes Tonight

Tonight’s Committee of the Whole agenda doesn’t seem like much. Trustees will discuss a proposal to aggregate electricity, they’ll talk about how much money the village took in for Montgomery Fest this year, and they’ll start planning next year’s budget process.

But it’s a topic not on the agenda that is likely to draw the most debate tonight. At Monday's Village Board meeting, Village President Marilyn Michelini asked village staff to respond to a written by Trustee Stan Bond, in which he criticized the idea of raising sales taxes to pay for road repairs.

In order to keep up with needed repairs to the road system, the village would need to spend $2.2 million a year, according to a study conducted in 2008. The village actually spent about $1.5 million in Fiscal Year 2010, and about $765,000 in FY 2011, using a mix of motor fuel tax funds and grant money.

Trustees are considering a referendum asking residents to raise the sales tax rate from 7% in Kane County and 7.25% in Kendall County to 7.5% in Kane and 7.75% in Kendall, to pay for road repair. But Bond believes more money can be found in the budget to alleviate the problem. In his , he noted that the general fund has increased nearly $3 million since 2005, and questioned why more of that money was not put toward street repair.

Bond also criticized the village’s use of township road and bridge taxes. The village takes in about $135,000 a year from the four townships that overlap its boundaries, and places that money into the general fund. By state law, road and bridge taxes shared with municipalities are supposed to be used for “the improvement of roads or streets” within the township paying them out.

And if they’re not, the township highway commissioner is allowed to ask for those funds back.

Aurora Township’s highway commissioner, John Shoemaker, said every municipality he is aware of puts road and bridge taxes into the general fund. Montgomery’s finance director, Jeff Zoephel, said he checked with other villages and found the same thing. Montgomery takes in about $43,000 a year in road and bridge tax from Aurora Township.

And while putting that tax money into the general fund means that there is no exact accounting of where it goes, and whether it’s being used for its intended purpose, Shoemaker said he’s certain Montgomery is doing what it’s supposed to.

The reason? The village uses the general fund to pay its street department, and that department’s budget is around $1.6 million this year. Roughly $1 million of that is used to pay for garbage removal, Zoephel said, so the streets department will use about $600,000—well more than the $135,000 the village will take in from the four townships.

Shoemaker said the definition of “improvement of roads or streets” is pretty broad, and can include plowing, striping, removing roadkill, or even putting up a stop sign. Shoemaker said he is within his rights to investigate if he has suspicions that the money is not being used incorrectly, but affirmed he has no such suspicions about Montgomery.

Still, Shoemaker said, he would like to see a more exact accounting of that money, and said if it wouldn’t be a burden on municipalities to provide it—Montgomery does not break down its street department work by township—he would ask for it. He said he has been talking with Montgomery and North Aurora about ways to provide that information.

“Montgomery is within the letter of the law, but I would feel better with something I can look at,” he said.

Bond, meanwhile, would like to see all of the road and bridge tax money put toward road repair and resurfacing. He’d like to see the money go into a dedicated fund for that purpose. Bond has been similarly critical of the village’s practice of using motor fuel tax funds to buy road salt, an allowable use of that money under the law.

“To me, this is a policy choice to make for both the Township contributions, and also the Motor Fuel Tax contributions,” Bond wrote in an email. “Whatever the current arguments might be for not using that money for road and street repair, we all know that the village will pay even more down the road for neglecting this responsibility now.”

Village staff will provide more information tonight, and trustees will likely discuss it. The Committee of the Whole meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. at , and is free and open to the public.