RALEIGH — Garden Williams Road was paved last year.
Actually, the paving covered a one-mile stretch of the road, which parallels Interstate 95 in northern Cumberland County and intersects N.C. 82.
Once the trees were cut down, the road graded, a culvert replaced and the asphalt laid down, the cost came to $728,547.
One small, single-family home sits on Garden Williams Road. Just after the new asphalt ends, a half-mile driveway leads to another home.
Garden Williams Road is a good example of why some state legislators and legislative staff have been arguing that the state’s dirt road paving program has about run its course, that it has become increasingly difficult to justify paving much of the remaining state-maintained dirt road in North Carolina.
Department of Transportation officials point out that many unpaved roads remain in some counties, particularly in the mountains where the cost of grading and paving twisting roadways is much higher.
Even so, numbers that the DOT recently provided me show that the questions that keep popping up about the funding need to keep being asked.
In the last fiscal year, the state spent $69.3 million paving roughly 200 miles of dirt road. About 4,400 miles of state-maintained, unpaved road remains. More than two-thirds of that total are on what the department calls a “hold list,” meaning that there have been right-of-way issues that could cause problems with the projects.
That leaves 1,475 miles of unpaved road eligible to be placed on county priority lists for paving.
The numbers suggest that after 30 years of a focused effort to put asphalt down on the remaining state-maintained dirt roads, there isn’t a whole lot of dirt road left out there that isn’t fairly cost prohibitive, faced with right-of-way problems, or presents environmental and permitting issues.
None of this has been lost on legislators.
In the current fiscal year, $47.5 million was cut out of the dirt road paving program. The majority of the money was shifted to maintenance of existing secondary roads, resurfacing existing roads and bridge improvements.
In 2005, legislators created more flexibility in the secondary road funding program, allowing county officials and DOT district engineers to decide whether to put money toward improving existing paved secondary roads or toward paving dirt roads.
Perhaps the people who pay for all this paving, the taxpayers of North Carolina, should look on these changes and decide that their elected officials have a pretty good handle on the issue.
But you might come to a different conclusion if, while driving north on Interstate 95 through Cumberland County, you look over to your right to see a three-quarters of a million dollar piece of blacktop fronting a single home.
Maybe that piece of road indicates that state’s approach to road paving needs a little more review.
Maybe it means that state leaders should acknowledge that some stretches of dirt road just can’t justify a costly coating of asphalt.
By Scott Mooneyham
(The Mountaineer)
March 26, 2012
