A transportation user fee might sound scary, but it could save El Pasoans millions in the long run – and finally fix our streets
On Monday, November 17, 2025, the El Paso City Council will discuss a Transportation User Fee to provide dedicated funding to street maintenance. While a new fee may sound like a bad thing, it could save taxpayers millions in the long run and finally deliver on past promises to improve the condition of our streets.
El Pasoans are frustrated with the condition of our streets, and understandably so. Only about one in five residents say they are satisfied with street maintenance, far below state and national averages. That frustration is rooted in a simple fact: our street network is aging faster than we can keep up with. The City maintains more than 6,100 streets with over 2,400 centerline miles, representing a $3.6 billion public asset. Today, roughly half of that network is rated fair, poor, or very poor. More than 344 miles fall below a Pavement Condition Index of 40 out of 100, and 52 miles are in such severe condition that they require full reconstruction, which today costs about $14 million per mile. These are a lot of statistics, but anyone who drives in this city already feels these numbers in their suspension.
Meeting even a basic “keep things from getting worse” standard would require resurfacing about 4 percent of the network every year, an annual investment of $75 million. Yet in recent years we have been spending closer to half that amount. Since 2012, the City has invested about $343 million in resurfacing and reconstruction, with an average of $35 million annually over the last three years. Those dollars have prevented our system from sliding further, but they haven’t been enough to meaningfully close the gap. Crucially, and for me, very concerningly, much of that spending has come from borrowing.
We are currently funding a lot of street work with bonds, i.e. debt financing. Over the lifetime of the bonds, typically 30 years, we as taxpayers pay approximately 80 percent additional in interest payments on top of the project costs. It’s easy to see that paying 180% of the real project cost is a bad situation, and it is made worse when you consider that the average useful life of a residential street is just 15 to 25 years (for the accountants out there, asphalt is typically depreciated over 15 years), so we will be stuck paying off streets we pave with debt this year even after they have to be repaved again the next time.
In other words, we are financing short-lived assets the way one might finance a house, except the house disappears halfway through the mortgage and has to be rebuilt. This is neither fiscally conservative nor fiscally progressive. It is simply wasteful and short-sighted.
Paying for streets with debt is bad for all of our wallets from a long-term sustainability perspective, and a user fee replaces sinking money into interest payments for decades. If we replace bond funding for streets with a user fee that provides cash up front to fund the same work, then we save on that huge interest cost, we can repair streets responsive to need instead of having to plan around bond issuances, and we aren’t upside down on debt for an asphalt asset that is completely depreciated. Put differently, this would replace increases to the debt service tax rate over the next 30 years with a defined and finite fee paid today, using dollars that have far greater buying power right now than they will decades into the future after inflation and borrowing cost. In practical terms: you get more asphalt for your buck.
I can understand why people feel concerned when they hear about a new fee, but you have to consider what that fee would be replacing and the impact beyond the immediate term. If we want our streets paved, my opinion is that we shouldn’t saddle El Pasoans present and future with massive debt to do it.
I also want to clear up a common misconception: state gas taxes and vehicle registration fees are not available to the City of El Paso to maintain residential streets. Not a cent of the state gas tax flows to the City; it goes to the state for interstate and state highways. And the County’s vehicle registration fee, which generates roughly $7 million per year, is legally restricted to paying off transportation-related debt issued by the Camino Real Regional Mobility Authority. None of it can be redirected to resurface neighborhood roads. Our local streets must be funded locally.
The fee being proposed that I think has the best chance of moving forward would charge $4.40 per month for a single-family residence, which in my opinion is quite affordable relative to its impact. There is an opt-out for any household that demonstrates that they don’t own a vehicle, and I have considered seeking a further exemption for properties with the senior/disabled exemption on property taxes.
As proposed, the fee would be calculated for a given property based on the estimated number of trips generated from the property based on land use. This means that unlike property taxes, the fee is also shifted proportionally to commercial properties, who would pay about 60 percent of the total because they generate about 60 percent of total vehicle trips. For some examples, a small medical office might pay $33/month, a fast-food restaurant might pay $498/month, and a large shopping mall might pay around $5,500/month.
In practical terms, this means everyday homeowners are no longer subsidizing the wear-and-tear caused by high-traffic commercial properties. The businesses generating the most trips, and therefore the most pavement impact, would pay the largest share.
A $4.40 fee would generate about $29 million each year, or $145 million over five years. With that funding, the City projects it could reconstruct 5 miles of failed streets, resurface 33 miles of roadway, invest in long-neglected sidewalk gaps and ADA improvements, and provide the matching funds needed to leverage federal transportation dollars. An $8 million local match could unlock $32 million in federal investment, which is money we routinely leave on the table because we lack the local dollars required to draw it down.
If the public really doesn’t want to do this, then we don’t have to do it, but it will leave us in the same bad place we’re in now. City Councils over several decades have tried both ignoring the problem for 20+ years and then digging out of that hole with debt financing, and neither of those strategies has created actual satisfaction among residents. I hope that people will at least critically engage with the idea of a Transportation User Fee, because it’s a concept with a huge upside: Pay for streets up front but pay about 45 percent less for them compared to the total we would otherwise pay with debt financing.
We can keep borrowing more and paying interest long after the asphalt has crumbled, or we can modernize how we maintain the municipal infrastructure we all depend on every day. A transportation user fee might sound scary, but the status quo is far scarier: streets that cost more every year, a backlog of work that keeps growing, and a debt burden that future generations will still be paying off.
This is an opportunity to choose long-term savings over short-term avoidance. And it’s an opportunity to finally bring our streets up to the standard the community has been asking for. Every year we wait, the bill gets bigger and the roads get worse.
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Chris Canales represents District 8, encompassing the Southside, Downtown, and areas of the Westside and Central, on the El Paso City Council.
You can view the full presentation to the City Council about a Transportation User Fee here.