Victory Heights County Road Maintenance District

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why do we need a Maintenance District to take care of our roads? Things seem work OK now.
We feel that, as more homes are built within Victory Heights, a more systematic approach to maintaining our roads is required; one that allocates costs more fairly to all property owners and results in higher quality roads. We would like to ensure that our roads are passable by emergency vehicles, even after heavy rains and snow. This is not always the case, currently.

2. Why isn’t the county maintaining our roads? We pay a lot of property taxes. It seems like we should get some return for that money.
It is a common misconception that road maintenance is funded by property taxes. If you check your most recent tax bill, you will find that no funds are allocated to road maintenance. Instead, road maintenance is funded by gasoline taxes. Even though we all pay gasoline taxes, these funds are limited and state law dictates which roads are eligible for public maintenance. Unfortunately, the Victory Heights roads don’t meet the eligibility criteria (see the Background section in the main memo).

3. Can’t we just form an Improvement District to bring our roads up to county standards, and have the County maintain them from then on?
We could, but the county standards require that the roads be paved prior to inclusion in the county highway system. The cost (estimated at over $2,000,000) to pave our roads would be prohibitive for our relatively small tax base.

4. Is a Maintenance District the same as a Home Owners Association? We’ve had bad experiences with HOAs in the past, and don’t want to have anything like that here.
Absolutely not! We have also had negative experiences with HOAs. There are at least two major differences between the proposed MD and an HOA. First, an HOA is typically much broader in scope than we are proposing for our MD. The purpose of an HOA is to maintain all common property and to ensure that home owners maintain a specified appearance for their property, to ensure that property values remain strong. Our proposed MD is limited in scope only to maintaining our roads. It will not deal with any other property, nor will it set and enforce any property appearance standards. The second major difference is in how they are funded. HOAs are private corporations or associations and are typically funded by the assessment of HOA dues, which are sometimes difficult to collect. Our proposed MD will be a political subdivision of the State of Arizona, will be overseen by the Navajo County Board of Supervisors acting as the Board of Directors, and will be funded by a property tax levy, which will be included in your property tax payments.

5. Why should I be included in the Victory Heights MD? I don’t use the Victory Heights roads.
If you have alternate access to Highway 260, and don’t ever use the Victory Heights roads, then you should not be included in the MD. If this is the case, please indicate this on your Survey Form, and return it to us. We will delete your property from the proposed MD.

6. Do we have any control over the actions of the MD? How do we prevent “runaway” budgets (and taxes)?
Procedures for property owner inputs to the operation and budgets of our MD remain to be worked out with the county. Although the County Board of Supervisors will serve as the Board of Directors for our MD, and will approve the annual budget and all expenditures of funds, we expect that they will appoint an Advisory Board of selected Victory Heights property owners to oversee the day-to-day operation of the MD. We expect that members of this Advisory Board would be available for informal interaction with other Victory Heights property owners. In addition, we would expect that the Advisory Board (and possibly the Board of Directors) would schedule periodic meetings to report to the MD property owners and to solicit operational and budget inputs from them.

7. What are our options in case things don’t work out as we hope? Improvement Districts are a “one time thing”, in that once the improvement is implemented, all that’s left to do is pay for it and the payments are known ahead of time. It seems as though an MD is much more open ended.
Termination procedures remain to be worked out with the county. Since the formation of an MD is requested by a majority of affected property owners signing a petition, we would expect that the termination of an MD could be accomplished in a similar fashion, i.e. a majority of affected property owners signing a petition requesting termination. Obviously, an MD could be terminated only if all outstanding obligations (e.g. to contractors) are taken care of.

8. As time goes on, can we expect our MD taxes to increase?
That depends. We can certainly expect that maintenance costs will go up over time, to account for inflation. However, that does not necessarily mean that our MD taxes would increase. Our area has been growing over the past few years, in that several new homes have been built. If this trend continues (which is likely, considering that several to-be-built homes are currently for sale), our tax base may grow faster than maintenance costs. If this happens, our individual MD taxes may go down. Of course, if you build a home on your property, your Assessed Full Cash Value will go up, and your MD tax allocation will also increase. However, in this scenario, you will also be making much more use of the roads.

9. Assuming that the results of this survey are in favor of establishing an MD, what are the next steps? When will the MD take over maintenance of the roads? When will we see an impact on our property taxes?
Please see the Next Steps section in the main memo. Note that under our current understanding of the schedule, our MD would receive no funds until late 2007, which is also when we will see the impact on our property taxes.

10. How are the MD costs going to be allocated to the property owners? We haven’t yet built on our property, so we hardly use the roads at all. It doesn’t seem fair that we should pay as much for the roads as those who are living in Victory Heights and use the roads all the time.
Costs will be allocated to each property owner within the MD based on the assessed valuation of their property (Assessed Full Cash Value). If you have a home, or other improvements, on your property, your assessed valuation will be higher and you will pay a higher allocation for the MD. Conversely, if your property is unimproved raw land, your assessed valuation will be much lower, and your MD allocation will also be much lower.

11. What happens if the MD is turned down?
In this case, nothing will change, and the roads will continue to be maintained informally and haphazardly as in the past. Moreover, as more homes are built, achieving equitable cost sharing among property owners will become increasingly difficult. Also, insurance costs may rise if providers become aware of the potential difficulty of emergency vehicle access.