City Reworks Assessment Process to Help Property Owners

Hopkins property owners should have more time to pay their assessments thanks to a change in the way the city plans street improvement projects.

Assessments are a recurring point of contention between property owners and city officials—. policy is for benefitting properties to pay 70 percent of street reconstruction costs and half the water service replacement costs. Homeowners counter that the assessments are too onerous for tough economic times and that they don’t have enough time to save.

In order to accommodate property owners, city officials reworked the process so that it should kick off two months earlier this year—with the feasibility study ordered in June instead of August. Construction would start a month early, in May instead of June.

That would make the neighborhood meetings and public hearings more convenient for property owners by moving them away from the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays to August and September.

Officials also want the council to wait until June 1 before collecting interest on assessments that aren’t prepaid. Under the current policy, homeowners have 30 days from the assessment hearing to prepay without interest.

The new schedule would set the hearing for Feb. 5, giving property owners four months between the hearing and the start of interest collection. Property owners would get the first details of the project at the neighborhood meeting in late August.

“I think the sooner they can put money aside, the happier we’re going to have the citizens,” said Councilwoman Kristi Halverson.

If nobody prepays, that would cost the city about $8,000 in interest, City Engineer John Bradford said. But he hopes the longer period will encourage more people to prepay—which, in turn, allows the city to borrow less for the project.

“I think we’re making it as easy for folks as we can,” he said.

Bradford estimated that about 15 percent of property owners prepaid in the past.

The new schedule should also benefit the city. Going out for bids earlier should attract more companies to compete for the project and lower the price. It also creates breathing room between the annual street project and the end-of-year budget process, which Bradford hopes will “depoliticize” infrastructure discussions.

Hopkins plans its next street project to be a two-year endeavor in the South Presidential Neighborhood that will cost about $6 million total. The city had to break the project into two parts because of the amount of construction involved. Hopkins can normally afford to reconstruct about 4,000 feet of roads in a year. The South Presidential Neighborhood project will reconstruct about 6,000 feet of roads.

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