Country club claims Lake Oswego overcharged by $127,500 for street fee

By Rebecca Randall

The Lake Oswego Review, Jan 17, 2011, Updated Jan 17, 2011 (2 Reader comments)

Oswego Lake Country Club sued the city of Lake Oswego Friday, hoping to recover street maintenance fees club officials said were overcharged.

The country club says that the city has collected $127,500 in excess of what it owed since the fee was established in 2004.

Street maintenance fees fund the Pavement Preservation Program, and a fee formula is intended to calculate the impact different businesses have on the city’s streets. Non-residential customers are charged based on the number of vehicle trips that are made at their location multiplied by square footage.

Last year, the city enacted an increase to the fee that is intended to go up each year through 2012, and the country club discovered that the formula had been misapplied at that time.

“The city simply made a calculation error in not dividing the total estimated trip miles by the appropriate assessment unit (in this case, by acre) before they evaluated which group rate applied. As a result, the city erroneously determined that the wrong rate applied,” according to country club treasurer Mike Temple.

The city, according to the country club, acknowledged the error and began studying the historical calculation used for the fee. In a series of discussions with city staff, the country club offered to accept the refund over time or as credit for future payments or even to accept a lesser amount.

“The city responded with offers which would give us credit for part of the overpayment against our future payments. Frankly it would take decades where we would recover the amount we thought we were entitled to,” said Paul Hart, president of the Oswego Lake Country Club, wrote in a letter to members.

“The city’s effort to avoid returning the full amount of the overcharges and their continued billing of the incorrect rate are, frankly, out of touch with reasonable expectations, discouraging and completely unacceptable,” Hart wrote in a letter to members.

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