AROUND THE TIME Mavis Willford became a thorn in the city’s side earlier this year, officials quietly considered burning down her home.
A 67-year-old employee of David Douglas School District, Willford had reason to make a fuss. She’d been on the verge of finally replacing her mold-infested manufactured home in East Portland’s Mill Park neighborhood when she hit a major road block: a new fee meant to help fix hundreds of miles of deficient city streets.
Because of that fee—known as the Local Transportation Infrastructure Charge, or LTIC—Willford was surprised to learn she’d need to pay $54,000 more than planned, potentially killing her aspirations for fungus-free living.
“We were doing okay until we got hit with that,” Willford said recently. “I went down and I talked to a guy. I said, ‘That’s half the price of my home.’ He said, ‘That’s the way it is.’”
Willford began complaining to anyone who would listen. She visited the office of Transportation Commissioner Dan Saltzman. She contacted the governor’s office. She reached out to the city’s ombudsman, Margie Sollinger, who investigates citizen complaints.
People wanted to help her, they said, but their hands were tied.
Under the LTIC program—passed by City Council in April 2016 and facing uncertainty and outcry from Portlanders of all stripes—citizens have no means of appealing the charge. It’s levied on people seeking a new single-family building permit on land that sits on an unimproved or under-improved street, which can mean anything from a road of pocked gravel to one that has no sidewalks. Exemptions are currently granted only in limited cases, such as when a natural disaster destroys a house.
The only disasters that had befallen Willford’s dilapidated home were moisture and the march of time, but officials at PBOT thought they might have a way to change that. If city firefighters were to burn her house down as part of a training exercise, they believed, Willford could be let off the hook under the disaster clause.