Comprehensive User Fee Study Services

The vendor is required to provide comprehensive user fee study (“services”) for to find rates that accurately account for the true cost of providing various services within city operations and to assess appropriate fees and rates allowing the city to recover the actual costs incurred for fee related services.
- User fee study for include:
• Conduct a comprehensive review of the city’s existing fees, rates, and charges.
• Identify the total cost of providing each city service at the appropriate activity level and in a manner that is consistent with all applicable laws, statutes, rules and regulations governing the collection of fees, rates, and charges by public entities including, but not limited to, proposition 218.
• Compare service costs with existing recovery levels; this should include any service areas where the city is currently charging for services as well as areas where perhaps the city should charge, in light of the city’s practices, or the practices of similar or neighboring cities.
• Recommend potential new fees and charges for services that the city currently provides but does not have any fees and/or charges established; recommendations should be based on practices by surrounding cities that may charge for similar services, industry best practices, or the consultant’s professional opinion.
• Recommend appropriate fees and charges based on the firm’s analysis together with the appropriate subsidy percentage for those fees where full cost recovery may be unrealistic.
• Prepare a report that identifies each fee service, its full cost, and recommended and current cost recovery levels; the report should also identify the direct cost, the indirect cost, and the overhead cost for each service.
• Prepare a report that identifies the present fees, recommended fees, percentage change, cost recovery percentage, revenue impact and fee comparison with other cities; a survey comparison of rates and fees with similar cities is for information only.
• Report on other matters that come to the consultant’s attention in the course of the evaluation that, in the consultant’s professional opinion, the city should consider.
• Provide a computer-based model for adjusting these fees and charges for the city’s current and future needs and provide the city with an electronic copy of the final comprehensive study, including related schedules and cost documentation in a format that can be edited and updated by city staff to accommodate changes in the organization or changes in costs; the requirements of the model should allow for:
1. Additions, revisions, or removal of direct and overhead costs so that the overhead cost allocation plan can be easily adapted to a range of activities, both simple and complex.
2. The ability of the city to continuously update the model and overhead cost allocation plan from year to year as the organization changes.
3. The addition of hypothetical service area information for future service enhancements, and the ability to calculate the estimated costs of providing the service under consideration (i.e. ad-hoc analysis).
• Provide training to enable staff to update fees on an annual basis.
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: March 14, 2025