Litchfield mayor promises to use HURFーnot general fundsーon roadway projects

The mayor of Litchfield Park pledged in a Wednesday council work study session his intention to better appropriate HURF dollars, instead of tapping into the general fund to pay for road improvements. 

Arizona cities and towns receive a portion of taxes and fees collected from fuel purchases and the registration and operation of motor vehicles from the Highway User Revenue Fund, or HURF. 

HURF dollars distributed to municipalities are intended to be put toward local transportation improvement projects. 

But in Litchfield Park, that money was left to accumulate, while transportation and road projects were paid using the general fund, according to comments made by Mayor Thomas Schoaf. 

“The way the city has dealt with the HURF funds for more than a decade has been to let them build up until the point that it became obvious that there was a build-up,” Schoaf said. 

“It was promised to (the) council multiple times by prior staff that they would make the appropriate movements of funds at the end of the year... and use the HURF funds instead of having all of the money come out of the general fund...Unfortunately, it didn’t always happen, in fact, it rarely happened,” Shoaf said, adding, “I think the staff understands going forward that we’re not going to do that.”

Cities and towns in Arizona receive 27.5% of HURF dollars. 

Litchfield Park receives around $440,000 from the state annually in HURF money, and the city spends between $300,000 and $600,000 a year in road maintenance and improvement since 2012. 

But city data show in the past decade, only a fraction of those expenses were funded using available HURF money.  The remainder of the projects were funded using the general fund, city staff said at the Wednesday meeting.

In 2013, for example, the city received about $300,000 in HURF money, but only used about $100,000 of available funds. In 2015, the city received $350,000, but used only $50,000 of those funds. 

This trend continued from 2012 until about 2019, when the city began to take advantage of HURF funds, but this decreases again during 2020 when construction was slowed during the pandemic. 

In 2021, HURF fund expenditures rose again. 

Schoaf explained at the meeting that because city funds have been “managed very conservatively” and since there was always an “excess of funds in the general fund...we didn’t need to worry about exactly where these monies were and how they were classified,” he said. 

“But it’s just not good practice,” Schoaf continued, “not to use the money the way it’s intended and to allow these large fund balances to build up. It’s better to use them throughout the year for their purpose, which is to maintain roads.”

The city’s HURF balance has grown to $1.1 million in available dollars to be spent on road projects in 2022.

City staff recommended the council spend HURF dollars on:

•  $600,000 in street maintenance
• $450,000 on the Litchfield Road mill and overlay scheduled for spring 2023
• $40,000 on the Village Parkway sinkhole repair, which has already been completed