City of Oak Harbor adjusts master fee schedule

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Oak Harbor residents will be paying more on a wide variety of city fees as leaders seek to catch up on long-overdue adjustments.

The council’s unanimous approval earlier this month of a revamped master fee schedule will mean higher costs for a range of things, from park reservations to utility bills to development-related permits. Tara Hizon was absent for the vote.

However, the new master fee schedule raised concerns among council members who had sticker shock from some large percentage increases.

While some fees were adjusted recently, others haven’t been updated since 2016, Finance Director David Goldman said during his presentation of the fee schedule’s annual review. This resulted in fee increases to appear comparatively high.

Among the fee changes, Goldman explained, “development services” fees were generally adjusted by 3% to 4%, though some increases were higher because they had not been updated for several years.

Additionally, many of the fees that target utilities saw much higher percentage increases as these changes were long overdue, he noted. For example, the fee for a delinquent payment for a utility collection has increased by 33%. What was previously a $15 fee is now a $20 fee. This fee has been unchanged since 2017.

The park reservation fees were also adjusted.

With the fire department having multiple fee changes, Fire Marshal Paul Schroer expanded on the fee schedule revisions, explaining that the old structure was more simplistic. This year, he has broken the fees into more specific categories — aligning Oak Harbor’s system with other jurisdictions around the state, he said.

Councilmember Eric Marshall expressed concerns about the city waiting so long to adjust the fee schedule, which resulted in larger increases at one time.

“I would encourage that we do these master fee increases a little bit more incrementally than waiting so many years and then having such a significant increase,” he said, citing examples of the 100% hike in fireworks display permits and a 471% increase for kayak and dinghy moorage.

City Administrator Sabrina Combs said the administration shared that goal.

“There were several years where we weren’t doing these updates,” she said. “So we tried to really do this full picture look at different departments … and we’re doing that work every year as we go. ”

She also noted that some percentage increases looked large only because the base amounts were already small, such as a $5 to $10 jump is a 100% increase even though it isn’t much of a difference in cost.

Weighing in, Councilmember Christopher Wiegenstein inquired about the long-term plan to prevent these major fee updates that previously slipped through the cracks. Goldman explained that with the mayor’s guidance the new process replaced the former “ad hoc” approach, with staff now reaching across departments to collect data more comprehensively and review fees annually.

Councilmember Jim Woessner expressed his approval of reviewing the master fee schedule on an annual basis, but agreed with his fellow council members that affordability matters and that they need to be able to justify each fee.