State legislators recently and wisely applied the brakes to a bill that would reclassify about 4,700 miles of state-maintained roads inside city and town limits and shift maintenance responsibility to local governments.
“We’ve parked that bill for the year — we’re not going to run it,” Sen. Clark Jenkins, sponsor of the Senate measure, said May 7.
Drafted by the State Department of Transportation, the bill is aimed at easing cash-flow problems within the department. While that legislation has elevated eyebrows inside municipal governments, another Senate bill hatched by the DOT has county government leaders rising to their feet.
A measure proposed by state Sens. Bob Rucho and Dan Clodfelter of Mecklenburg County would have counties take over about 64,000 of the 79,000 highway miles currently maintained by the state.
Most other states place the burden of maintaining secondary roads with county taxpayers. But the DOT has held that responsibility in North Carolina since the Great Depression. Local governments have lobbied against moving the road-maintenance burden away from the state because such a dramatic shift would require a significant spike in property taxes — particularly in rural eastern counties.
The DOT’s immediate interest is in closing a $300 million funding gap in Gov. Beverly Perdue’s proposed budget. But the department appears to be speeding recklessly through a small construction zone in an effort to bypass a much larger area of responsibility. The most reasonable source for making up any immediate DOT shortfall is the state’s gasoline tax, not a major restructuring of road maintenance duties.
Indeed, the Senate proposed on May 7 to cancel a 2-cent cut in the state motor fuels tax that was scheduled to take effect on July 1. If affirmed in a final Senate vote, and by the House and the governor, the gas tax will stay at 29.9 cents for the rest of the year and could go higher in the future.
Having the bulk of road maintenance rest with county and municipal governments works for most states, and it may well be the best course for the future of North Carolina. But such a move must be made with careful, timely and equitable deliberation, with taxpayers being the ultimate beneficiaries.
On the issue of timeliness, it stands to reason that if the state took on the burden of road maintenance to help local governments during the Great Depression, the time for giving back that responsibility is not during the worst economic crisis to affect the state since.
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