FARGO - After hearing homeowners here complain about painfully high special assessments that were the result of a 2015 City Commission decision, city leaders voted Monday, May 21, to turn back time.

The action makes it as if elected leaders had never changed the cost-share for streets and sewers that made benefitting property owners pay more and other taxpayers pay less.

For those paying or are about to pay the higher specials, Monday's decision means their tax bill will shrink. For those who have paid all their specials, it means refunds.

Commissioner Tony Grindberg offered the motion of reverting to an older cost-share arrangement while city leaders try to craft a better special assessment funding policy. He said many taxpayers have expressed concern to him. "It's time to bring this forward now," he said.

"Certainly the political rhetoric on special assessments in this (city election) campaign has brought this to a higher state," he added. "People are watching what we're doing. Misinformation is being shared."

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The five commissioners voted unanimously to revert to the earlier cost-share arrangement.

Commissioner Tony Gehrig, who has made eliminating specials altogether a campaign issue, said Monday's vote is just the first step and he hopes it doesn't end there.

For years, Fargo has paid for its street and sewer projects with a combination of sales taxes and special assessments, a kind of property tax that's based not on property value but benefits derived from the projects. At the end of 2015, city leaders decided to split the costs with property owners 50-50, a big change from the 2013 policy of splitting the cost 70-30, with sales taxes paying the larger share.

Because specials are typically thousands of dollars, they've never been popular with homeowners, but they became even more unpopular after 2015. Last year, some homeowners on Broadway North saw specials in the $15,000-to-$20,000 range. So many complained that city leaders put their specials on hold while the city studied a remedy.

According to Brenda Derrig, a division leader in the Engineering Department, the 2015 City Commission changed the cost-share to 50-50 at her department's request because the burden on the city was too heavy. She told commissioners Monday that construction costs were on the rise, state funding was less generous and the city was paying a lot of money for flood control. If the city was to go back to the 70-30 split of 2013, she said, it would likely not be able to take on as many street and sewer improvements each year as it now does.

Commissioner Dave Piepkorn said he was in the room when the Engineering Department asked to change the cost-share and he implied that it seemed prudent then.

"The good thing about good leadership is, if there's something that's not going well, to be willing to make a change. That's a good thing. We realize this is not turning out how it's been presented to us through no one's fault in particular, just how things have gone."

Monday's decision to go back to the 2013 cost-share arrangement will require city staff to recalculate specials, according to Dan Eberhardt, the city's special assessment coordinator. He said staff will then ask the commission to approve a plan to finance the higher cost-share.