Shifting secondary road costs to cities, counties no solution
Proposal would put an unfunded mandate on local governments.
Posted: Wednesday, Jul. 01, 2009
From Durham Mayor Bill Bell and High Point Mayor Rebecca Smothers, co-chairs of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition transportation committee, in response to “Let counties, cities control their roads,” by Sens. Dan Clodfelter and Bob Rucho.
(June 17 Viewpoint):
The state is in a budget crisis. We all understand that some changes must occur. But shifting the state's responsibility to local government is not the solution to the state's transportation funding problems.
Senate Bill 748 sponsored by Sens. Clodfelter and Rucho would do just that. The bill would transfer nearly 80 percent of the state's roads to cities and counties.
Sens. Clodfelter and Rucho wrote recently that the best way to improve the quality of the state's secondary road system (some 64,000 miles) is to transfer the responsibility for construction and maintenance to municipal and county governments. The remaining 15,000 miles of the state system – including the interstates, urban loops and primary roads – would remain under the NCDOT.
The senators tell us that this shift would improve the overall quality of the total system. What it would actually do is force counties into the “road business” and potentially establish 100 county transportation departments, thereby losing efficiencies we gain through one state DOT. It would require that both county and municipal governments assume responsibility for a system that the senators wrote “is crumbling under its own size and weight.”
On the surface you might think the senators' plan sounds good. But the senators themselves said the funds to care for these roads are increasingly inadequate. Ask yourself, if the state had the money to properly care for these roads, why would they be proposing to transfer them to local government? Let us explain why municipal governments are objecting to the increased responsibility.
The state collects a gas tax at the pump for road construction and maintenance and passes some of it through to cities for the 21,332 miles cities currently have responsibility for. But these pass-through revenues only cover half the total spent on city-maintained roads annually. The rest of the costs are funded by local city taxes. North Carolina has the highest gas tax in the Southeast and yet the per-person highway expenditures are only average for the Southeast. Is it fair to require additional local property taxes to support a new unfunded or underfunded mandate that the N.C. citizen has already paid for at the pump?
Local governments want good roads for our citizens and we want to partner with the state to find real solutions for our state's transportation problems. We want to be part of a discussion that begins to chart a new and positive course for the future of transportation in North Carolina. But transferring 64,000 miles of road responsibility to another level of government during these trying economic times is NOT the place to start.
###
