Two-Way Consolidated Road Maintenance Plan

Across the country, local forces maintaining state-owned roads is used sporadically.  Typically these agreements are with cities and towns, but much more rarely are county forces used for this purpose.  However, two states employ county forces heavily in maintenance of state-owned roads: Wisconsin and Michigan.  In Wisconsin, counties are required to maintain all state-owned roads while in Michigan 3/4 of the counties in the state use their own forces to maintain state-owned roads.  However, it should be also noted in these states that county road responsibility is far more limited than in other states like those in the West and South where townships do not own the lowest level roadways.  This means that using county agencies to maintain state-owned roads in these other states who lack townships to handle the most local streets is sporadic with Florida being one of the few places it is ever used.

Wisconsin is the only state to have a requirement that county forces must maintain all state-owned roads.  This equips counties to work on levels close to the state.  This intersection of County Roads Y & KP in Roxbury show that engineering standards are better when county agencies work closely with the state and are better equipped and funded.  While the roads are not completely to the levels of state-owned secondary roads, they are better maintained than similar separate county road systems in other states.  (Image from Google Street View, 2013)

Using county forces to maintain state highways is still a decent functional consolidation measure.  It is basically the reverse of the method used in Virginia, and it makes sense under certain conditions.  The usual benefits realized from putting county forces in charge of state road maintenance include cost efficiency through removal of duplication of services, access to funding sufficient to hire professional services, lower costs for both the state and local agency and typically improved standards on a local level.  Such benefits, however, will still require a strong state-local relationship with significant training and materials available to the local government.  It will also require substantial funding coupled with responsibility entrusted to a local level and some strings attached to state-aid funding.  This is why this plan is updated with some new mechanisms.

It should also be noted that the county's ability to maintain a state-owned road has much to do with population and internal resources.  State-aid payments are obviously highly beneficial to the local government, but these benefits are limited by state-owned road mileage and of course the resources on a county level.  If state mileage is sparse or the unincorporated county population is low, the intended results on a county level are not likely to be realized.  Thus, in the stronger counties, the counties should maintain state roads and in weaker counties, the state or a regional cooperative agency should maintain county roads.  It should be noted that state DOT is typically a stronger partner in rural areas while counties are typically a stronger partner in urban areas.

Another thing to note is how much is the county actually responsible for?  If the county responsibility and tax base has been trashed by municipal annexation, then contracting with a county for state road maintenance might not be beneficial.  What good is a county with 700,000 people if only a small corner of the county with about 35,000 people has county government providing municipal services while the rest is incorporated?  Unless the county is providing road maintenance services to most of the municipalities in that county, not much.  The rule of thumb should be that any county that is given responsibility for state highways should have both an adequate tax base and large enough unincorporated population.  Thus, the reason that instead of proposing full local maintenance responsibility of state routes or state responsibility for local roads and streets, a "two-way" plan was developed meaning one of two options is chosen based on local needs and capabilities.

WHY THIS IS A TWO-WAY PLAN

The agencies most likely to benefit from local maintenance of state highways are counties and municipalities with higher populations and adequate state road mileage to adequately finance local work.   Ideally, the unincorporated population should be large enough to support a county-level DOT structure meaning that at the very minimum the county should have an unincorporated population of at least 100,000 residents and/or a total population of the same if the municipalities and counties share that responsibility.  In states where the counties are in charge of only farm-to-market roads only such as New Jersey (because townships maintain local streets), the same holds true.  The two-way plan means that local agencies who do not want or cannot handle state highway responsibility are instead permitted to contract road maintenance with either the state DOT, a rural regional cooperative agency or statewide cooperative agency.  In fact, this plan relates to other plans in a number of ways.  The primary combinations include:

• Individual counties/cities contracted to maintain state roads (based on population threshold)
• State DOT contracted to maintain county roads and municipal streets (in lower population counties/municipalities)

Secondary combinations involve regional cooperatives meaning that if a county is too small to provide state-maintenance services, the state DOT can pass on responsibility to a rural statewide cooperative or rural regional cooperative (based on federal planning regions):

• Rural statewide cooperative contracted to maintain both state roads and county roads/municipal streets (rural and low population counties/municipalities only)
• Rural regional cooperative contracted to maintain both state roads and county roads/municipal streets (same as above, but limited to a certain region)
• A split of rural regional cooperatives and state DOT maintenance
• In this instances, regional cooperatives only exist in certain areas and functionally act as a large population county
• In other rural parts of the state where a regional cooperative does not exist, the state DOT handles that responsibility directly

The important thing to note here is that counties and cities do NOT have an option to opt out of this plan.  This is a required arrangement where a local government chooses one of two categories.  They cannot operate independent of the state DOT.  They either are providing services on behalf of the state DOT or either the state DOT or regional cooperative provides services on their behalf.  These are the choices available to every local government. They include:

1. Expand county operations to include maintenance of state-owned roads complete with required per-mile payments from the state DOT
2. Contracting to use state forces on local roads/streets if no cooperative system exists (local government pays the state DOT an operations fee to do so)
3. Contracting road maintenance to regional cooperative (who will also be required to maintain state roads)
4. Contracting road maintenance to statewide cooperative (who will also be required to maintain state roads)

At this point, the situation may seem a little confusing, but the goal is to have all road maintenance and engineering consolidated where the state DOT and local governments are never operating separately and duplicating services.  To put it simply, the historical split of state and local agency is eliminated in favor of a cooperative arrangement where the option is not whether to contract or not but who to contract with and how that arrangement should be structured.

LOCAL MAINTENANCE OF STATE HIGHWAYS: CONDITIONS

Local maintenance is not a guarantee of good practices on a local level.  Because of this, local authority would have to be reduced to make these arrangements work effectively.  Population thresholds should also be adequate so that the local agency is well-funded and is able to meet state standards without a special infusion of state-aid funding upsetting the balance of funding available to other local agencies.  In Virginia, all cities and many towns maintain state-owned surface roads.  Until recently this was not always a positive arrangement since many cities and towns did a terrible job with road maintenance, and many still do not maintain state-owned roads correctly.  Many smaller cities and towns also do not have proper population thresholds to adequately fund or maintain roads thus they are taking advantage of state payments without producing results that sufficiently match state efforts.  This is why some ground rules are needed for any local agency to be permitted to maintain a state highway:

• Local road maintenance on state-owned roads must meet state standards in order to receive state funding.  This means that all traffic signs, pavement markings, traffic signals and any other items must meet state standards and MUTCD standards regardless of cost.
• The state DOT must pay a rate-per-mile equivalent to what it would cost the state to maintain their own roads to the local partner agency.  
• Local agencies (primarily county agencies) will lose funding and lose control of road maintenance operations to the state if they cannot or will not follow those standards
• The minimum unincorporated county population threshold for local maintenance of state routes is 100,000 residents.  Counties of lower population may not do so unless they form cooperatives with adjacent municipalities or counties that are high enough to reach adequate population threshold.  However, cooperatives should preferably be designed to at least cover a federal planning region.
• County maintenance of state routes should be made a requirement for local control.  Counties that are unable to maintain state roads should be required to transfer all routine road maintenance of both state-owned and county-owned roads to the state DOT, regional cooperative agency or rural statewide cooperative agency.  In other words, the system must be consolidated one way or another.
• This rule should also apply to cities and towns.
• Cities, towns and townships of inadequate population should be required at the very least to consolidate traffic control with the agency responsible for state and county roads in the county.
• Regional cooperatives will typically include the transfer of entire routine road maintenance in cities and towns to the cooperative.
• If the city or town is less than 25,000 residents, the agency responsible for state and county roads in that county should have engineering supervisional authority
• A county and/or municipal agency must have both a registered civil engineer on staff and a traffic operations unit headed by a PTOE in order to qualify for local maintenance of state routes
• Guide signs and route markers on locally-maintained state routes should be furnished by the state DOT.  These should also be furnished by the state along locally-owned roads to maintain system coordination and route continuity.
• Payments to local agencies should be uniformly based on either funding per mile or a maximum funding ratio based on population and road mileage available to the local agency where they will not be reimbursed for work beyond a certain amount

LOCAL AGENCIES AND EFFICIENCY

The purpose of county roads and municipal streets should not be seen as simply a means to split responsibility between a state and local agency, because the presence of a local agency maintaining roads should mean that the local government can demonstrate that it has the population and resources to do what the state is able to do equivocally or better.  In other words, state responsibility for all roads within a certain jurisdiction is entrusted instead of devolved to a local level.  This is a completely different view from the "ownership" structure where local agencies are free agents working independently of the state while still being dependent on state-aid payments.  This is why ideally all counties and all municipalities who maintain their own road networks should also be maintaining state highways that pass through them as well.  In fact, that should be a requirement as part of a local agency maintaining their own roads.  Essentially any local agency that is able to maintain their own roads should also be able to maintain state-owned roads because they have the resources to do so.  If they do not have the resources to do this, then clearly they also do not have the resources to maintain their own local road networks.  The inability of a local agency to maintain state-owned roads to state levels exposes the fundamental deficiencies that affect local agencies.  

LOCAL AGENCIES WITH NO STATE-OWNED ROAD MILEAGE

Most counties typically have at least some state-owned road mileage within their borders, but this is a different case in regards to municipalities.  It is not uncommon for a city or town to not have a single state-owned road within their boundaries.  Considering the requirement that all local agencies that maintain their own roads must also contract with the state, are these agencies exempt?  Perhaps they could be, but these agencies should then be subject to the population thresholds requirements meaning they will be expected to contract routine maintenance with the public agency responsible for county and state roads.  This means the city, township or municipality would become captive to whoever is responsible for maintaining county roads.  This includes:

• The state DOT
• County government
• Regional/Statewide Cooperative  

The goal is that no local agency should be maintaining their own roads if they cannot demonstrate that they are able to fully comply with state and federal standards.  Captive municipalities that fall across multiple counties would fall under responsibility of the agency (state or county) that handles the county where the municipality has the highest population.  This means if Byrnesville has 500 people in Gray County and 1,500 in Frost County, then Byrnesville will be contracted with the agency responsible for Frost County.

CANDIDATES FOR LOCAL MAINTENANCE OF STATE HIGHWAYS

The general view of county agencies is that they need an unincorporated population threshold that is at least 100,000 to maintain their own roads.  Cities and towns, however, need to have a population that is lower due to a stronger tax base and a smaller geographical area.  However, if the local agency is maintaining state roads that means that they are receiving state funding based on state system mileage.  In other words, other factors are present such as the number of miles that they maintain and how well equipped they are after those payments are made.  This also means that the needed population threshold may drop significantly thus a county with 25,000 residents with a high number of state-owned roads would stand to benefit far more greatly than the same with far less.  This means a county with 25,000 residents could potentially finance road maintenance as well as a county working separately from the state with 100,000 residents.  For instance, a county with 25,000 residents might have 35 miles of state roads within their jurisdiction.  If the state pays $12,000 per mile then that county receives $420,000 per year.  Let's look at some of what that $420,000 could cover:

• Licensed professional civil engineer: $90,000
• Licensed professional traffic operations engineer (PTOE): $80,000
• Traffic signs and pavement markings: $25,000
• Equipment purchases and maintenance: $100,000
• Labor: $80,000
• Other Expenses: $45,000 (includes fuel, winter maintenance, pothole patching, etc.)

This means that this county that otherwise would not have been able to afford to do so otherwise now has a budget for all of these additional items.  It is granted that they would have to include local costs on state-owned roads, but they would have the ability to do far more with less.  Equipment is being used for both road systems, two full-time employees can be hired at $40,000/year, safety improvements can be better financed and two traffic engineers with one specializing in traffic control that they previously could not afford can help better manage the road system.  Obviously an initial merging of responsibility might require an excess of labor costs due to attrition, but this shows a fundamental outcome for an otherwise small rural county.  However, if those engineers were shared among, for instance, three counties in a regional cooperative agreement the sum of available funding would go up for the other bullets below.  It would obviously make more sense for three counties with a total population of over 100,000 to share that responsibility: especially if it freed the counties from having to contract with the state DOT.

Looking at these numbers, counties who are eligible to retain local control would be far higher than similar counties working independent of the state when they are also required to maintain state highways.  This means that the state would have far fewer captive agencies.  With the proper conditions met and regional cooperatives formed in lower population areas, it is fully expected that between 40 and 85% of counties in every state would be able to adequately maintain state highways thus retaining at least some degree of local control of roads.  The remaining counties would be required to combine forces with other jurisdictions or use state forces.  The population threshold requirement is actually more about forcing cooperative arrangements than it is actually forcing the state DOT to take over rural road maintenance.

COORDINATION WITH THE STATE

State DOT's would have the authority to supervise local functions along state-owned roads thus local agencies would be properly trained in use of equipment and materials.  With the state also providing adequate equipment, it would also be possible for local governments to do things they were not able to afford to do previously.  In all, this would greatly strengthen the capacity of local agencies.  

REGIONAL FUNCTIONS IN LOCAL MAINTENANCE

Wisconsin DOT noted the fundamental flaws of using county forces to maintain state roads.  One of those is that most counties lacked the resources to own and maintain expensive or sparsely used equipment.  This is where either local agencies set up their own regional equipment centers or the state DOT regions set up a special equipment operations center.  In this, the local governments create a list of equipment that they do not need on a regular basis or cannot afford on their own.  In the former, multiple local agencies create a special facility where the equipment is store paying for it collectively based on population and using it on an appointment basis.  In the latter, the state purchases this equipment for each region and loans or leases it to the local agencies for a set time period.  This means that equipment purchases are shared across multiple jurisdictions.  

Here are some examples.  The former plan might have five counties sharing a road grader.  The road grader costs $150,000.  If one county has 20% of the population, then the county's share of the cost for purchasing the road grader is $30,000.  The trade-off is that they must share it with the five other counties.  In the latter plan, DOT District 2 has a list of about 10 items that contracted counties cannot afford on their own.  The state (or a regional cooperative) then sets up a special barn that houses these equipment and arranges times when they are allowed to use it leasing it on a daily rate to the local agency to help cover costs of equipment maintenance.  Either way, putting some equipment on a regional level will help offset costs for local agencies in charge of maintaining state roads.  

DISADVANTAGES TO THIS PLAN AND HOW IT CAN BE IMPROVED

Local agencies are not always trustworthy when it comes to following proper protocols when it comes to road construction and maintenance.  A lack of funding is not always the issue.  Sometimes a local agency misuses state-aid funds and thus allows maintenance to suffer even if population and funding is otherwise adequate.  Consider the City of Baltimore and their poor maintenance of interstate highways running through the city.  This is why some controls are needed in this plan.  First is the requirement that a local agency must meet and exceed state and federal standards to be eligible.  This means that if the local agency falls out of compliance or is not doing a good job, they will lose authority to maintain not only state-owned roads but also their own roads.  As a result, the local maintenance of state highways exists in conjunction with captive agencies who must contract their road maintenance to the state within the same state.  It needs to be all or nothing: the local or regional agency works for the state and does a good job or the state DOT assumes management.  This means that local municipalities who are captive to counties are subject to this as well.  Either way the duplication of services does not exist.  There is no division of responsibility, but there is a division of ownership.  Employees would not risk losing their job and costly facilities would not need to be built if road maintenance changed hands: they would just have a different boss if the situation changes.

Another pitfall of this plan is that the states cannot adopt this plan halfheartedly.  If they lack the political will to take over county and/or municipal roads as a penalty for poor maintenance practices, regional cooperatives are not pursued in cases the state DOT does not want local involvement or if they allow local governments to maintain state and/or local roads below required standards then it is not a good plan.  Quality controls are necessary to make this plan work or it will simply be abused with negligible improvements in road quality.  In all, this is the only plan that entrusts local governments to maintain roads given better tools to work with, so it needs to be designed in such a way to assure that uniformity and quality are part of the system.

Lastly, application of this plan statewide will be difficult since many local agencies will be unable to or disinterested in working with the state on anything.  Many states do not have good working relationships between state and local agencies making full scale implementation difficult.  If a top down approach is employed, then it will require every county to maintain state highways thus defeating the purpose of the checks and balances in this plan as well as assuming that every county is actually financially and structurally capable of this added responsibility.

EXAMPLE

The primary example of where this concept can be extended is in Virginia.  Several counties across the state have shown interest in maintaining their own roads, and cities across the state are already required to maintain state-owned roads.  Since that is the case, these counties that want to go on their own should not require a separation from the already efficient state highway system.  Instead, VDOT should simply transfer authority for all roads that they currently maintain (both primary and secondary) to the county.  This means that counties like Fairfax or Chesterfield, all with very high populations, could gain control of their roads only with the condition that the entire operation falls into their hands including the state-owned primary routes.  Likewise, the two existing counties in the state who maintain their own road networks would be required to take over state-owned primary route maintenance with new requirements that they meet state standards.

CONCLUSION

States across the country are pushing for increased local control, but local agencies need greater funding and better oversight to do so.  The best way to achieve this is by dissolving state maintenance divisions into local responsibility for surface state roads where it makes sense, but where it does not the state itself or a regional agency acting on behalf of the state does this on behalf of both the state DOT and the county.  This creates not only cost savings on a state level, but also provides much greater funding on a local level to do far more than they were able to do independent of the state.  However, in doing so a risk is created in that roadway standards either do not improve on a local level or decline on a state level if arrangements do not take into account that local control has weaknesses that must be properly addressed.  The goal of any such agreement is to create what can be achieved with state maintenance of local roads, but in reverse by using local forces instead.  If that goal cannot be achieved, then such agreements between local agencies should not be pursued.  

Some local agencies would not be helped by the creation of state maintenance agreements primarily due to the absence of any state-maintained roads within their jurisdiction such as in cities and towns.  The rules for these agencies must be different in that they must still comply with the same standards thus requiring that low population cities and towns become captive for road maintenance to whomever is in charge of county roads.  The agency in charge of routine maintenance for the city or town equates to which agency is in charge of county roads.

For agencies that do participate, quality control measures must be an integral part of this system.  All counties contracted with state forces must meet state and federal standards, must have two engineers: a county engineer and a PTOE.  All local agencies must also maintain surface state roads in order to retain the authority to maintain their own county road network.  Thus, consolidation becomes a requirement by law: either the counties maintain state-owned roads or they must contract with another larger agency.  Likewise, the state has a responsibility to make sure that all local agencies are consistently paid a fair and equitable amount for state level work.  All local agencies would in effect be reimbursed on an average cost-per-mile that is otherwise available for state highways.  This means if the state requires $10,000 per mile then instead the county, city or town is also paid $10,000 per mile. 

This plan also includes the discussion of some regional organization for the purpose of equipment purchases for the use among multiple agencies.  Since local agencies are still limited by cost and frequency of need, either multiple counties or the state need to manage expensive or sparsely used equipment so that it is available for use by all local jurisdictions regardless of size.  

In all, this plan is designed to help preserve local control while making it conditional on capabilities.  This achieves the joint goals of helping states to increase local control while subsequently improving accountability and maintenance levels on a local level.  However, it should also be noted that state highway mileage is a significant factor.  If the state ratios are too low then local agencies are less likely to benefit from state-aid and thus roadway conditions may not improve as much.  This is why this is not a one-size-fits-all approach to road maintenance.  The goal of this plan is to allow mostly higher population counties and municipalities to achieve better road standards through better funding and better economies of scale while helping to reduce costs on a state level.  Otherwise, the state becomes the caretaker of roads for other local agencies who are not yet able to meet those goals.

Local Exchange Plan: Interagency Service Swapping

The Local Exchange Plan is an adaptation of Agility Agreements, a program that was created in 1997 by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.  The state created the program as a means of reducing costs and improving standards among state and township road networks across the state.  Elements of this plan have been adopted in the Traffic Control Cooperative Plan.  In the traditional local maintenance contract method, state agencies pay local forces to maintain state roads.  This means that if the agency maintains state roads in lieu of the state agency that the state basically reimburses the local agency for work completed on the state road which the local agency uses to fund better operations than they normally could provide.  However, the traditional method has many pitfalls.  The agility plan corrects this by contracting with local agencies for specific state-level duties that are typically more labor intensive and less technical.  In return, the local agency is provided materials, equipment or a service by the state.  The net sum exchanged comes to zero so that no money is exchanged.  It is essentially a barter plan that keeps both state and local agencies intact allowing each agency to play off each other's strengths to compensate for their weaknesses.

Old US 22 in Bethel Township, PA is a town-maintained road designated T-721.  However, in this image the sign on the right has a PennDOT logo with many signs on the road similarly meeting state standards.  This means that this town is or was recently in an agility agreement where the town is providing limited maintenance on state-owned roads in turn for the state providing traffic signs and pavement markings such as what is seen here.  In all, this road is far better maintained than it would be without the agility agreements, which are the model for the Local Exchange Plan.

THE TRADITIONAL METHOD'S PITFALLS

The traditional method of contracting local forces to maintain state roads is a troubled method for a number of reasons:

• States or local agencies do not meet their ends of the bargain with either states not always adequately reimbursing local governments adequately for state level work or local agencies not completing required duties on behalf of the state
• Many local governments are too small for this tactic to make any real difference in local road quality
• Operations fees are too much of a financial burden on local agencies when paid to the state or another cooperative agency while states are likewise unwilling to portion off a large portion of their budget to include local road maintenance.
• Accountability is often weak in such agreements meaning that state roadways maintained by the local authorities may actually be maintained significantly below state standards (especially in city/town maintenance agreements)
• Local agencies are often not properly equipped or staffed for state-level road maintenance operations (especially in city/town maintenance agreements)
• Formal agreements with local governments tend to be highly bureaucratic and political thus difficult to create
• State standards are typically not required in such agreements meaning that added state-level funding does not necessarily mean state highway quality

THE LOCAL EXCHANGE ADVANTAGE

The beauty of the local exchange plan is that many of the complications involved with traditional state contracts with local governments are greatly reduced.  The general view of such agreements is that local governments are much better at handling work that is less technical and more labor intensive that requires more routinely used equipment and materials.  On the other hand, states are better at handling more highly technical work that involves the use of skilled personnel, more expensive equipment and/or materials that local governments routinely lack.   Pennsylvania is a good example of this considering that their primary source of local government consists of townships who would have an extremely difficult time meeting state standards on their own.  The local exchange plan continues to correct this discrepancy between small municipal governments and the state.

Typically, when a local government enters an agility agreement the duties usually include the following:

• Winter maintenance/snowplowing
• Summer mowing and brush cutting
• Grading and drainage
• Pothole patching
• Minor road repairs
• Traffic signal maintenance (in larger jurisdictions)

A state government in contrast usually makes up the cost of work provided by the local government usually providing the following:

• Engineering/traffic studies
• Equipment purchases
• Traffic sign installation
• Traffic signal installation
• Guardrail installation/repair
• Pavement markings
• Larger roadway repairs

When agility agreements became a normal source of service delivery, PennDOT was able to flex more muscle with local agencies than it did in the past.  The state now requires substantial compliance with state and MUTCD standards on traffic control devices along local roads and streets, and roadways maintained by local governments continue to substantially improve to near state levels.  It should be noted, however, that Pennsylvania maintains a very large state highway system consisting of 40,000 miles of state-maintained roads or 34% of the highway system.  This means that most townships have a sizable ratio of state-owned roads meaning that the dollar value of work on state roads completed by towns usually means a sufficient level of work returned to the local level on behalf of the state.  Because of this, such a plan has limitations and is not possible everywhere.  If PennDOT abandoned their system of secondary state roads, the agility program would likely also disappear.  In the meantime, this special method of service delivery has improved local roadway standards while subsequently reducing overhead costs for both parties.

WHERE LOCAL EXCHANGE AGREEMENTS WORK BEST

The major issue with the local exchange plan is that this will only work in areas where state road mileage is high enough to provide adequate resources to local governments.  Across much of the US, many cities and towns do not have any roads on the state highway system.  Many counties also have far too few miles of state-owned roads to see any significant advantage in expanding operations to cover a few miles of state roadways.  Equipment costs would need to be adequately offset by ample funding to maintain and replace far more frequently used equipment, thus payments seem far more appealing.

Mile-per-mile, unless a local jurisdiction has a sufficient number of state-maintained road miles within their jurisdiction, the local agency would likely see far more benefit receiving payments for each mile maintained.  If the state pays, for instance, $12,000 per mile and the state has 20 miles of state roads within the local jurisdiction, the local jurisdiction will receive $240,000 a year: more than enough to cover employee budgets and equipment costs with a little left over for maintenance or engineering services.  In a local exchange agreement, the local agency would not be completely responsible for the entire maintenance of those 20 miles of roads, but the extra costs ensued by the local government will not include funding the costs for gas, equipment, repairs or labor for specific operations handled on behalf of the state.  A local agency may not be interested in that in exchange for street signs thus why participation is not 100% in Pennsylvania.

Nevertheless, counties would be the strongest contenders for local exchange plans. In states where at least 1/6 of the highway system is state controlled, agility would assure a healthy sum of funding guaranteed to all participating local governments each year.  This means if the county did $45,000 worth of work for the state, the county would receive $45,000 worth of state-level, state-supervised work including traffic studies and even equipment loans that could be used to fund or aid in guardrail repairs, replacement of road striping, new traffic signs, traffic studies or a combination of the any of the above.  This means that a county that is in a local exchange agreement could afford substantially more improvements on their roads without any downsizing or added costs on the state.

Regional Roads In the Local Exchange Plan

The local exchange plan could also work very well in larger regional road districts.  Even if the state has very few miles under state control, a regional district could still gain significant funding this way.  Consider this example:

The River Region has 425 miles of state roads that fall within their region.  The region has contracted to provide snow plowing, mowing and pothole patching on all 425 miles of state routes (assuming they are all surface routes) out of the total agency responsibility of 3,500 miles.  The total cost for the River Region was $643,000 in 2016.  Instead of paying the region $643,000, the DOT provides replacement or repaired equipment valued at $175,000, installs a traffic signal at $180,000 and the rest is used to cover new signs and striping on 40 roads.  The $288,000 worth of traffic control items was previously going to have to be put among the 12 counties and municipalities with traffic control in disrepair, but none of the local agencies were willing to budget much above the annual operations fee.  One county with a payment of $17,000 in operations fees was only willing to budget $3,000 when the regional agency had determined that at least $20,000 worth of work was needed.  At $24,000 per county, the region was then able to cover that county's needs.  In this plan, the state also saved money by not having to provide these services in-house or through contractors instead relying on the regional district.  In turn, they helped them manage the cost of providing this service on behalf of the state.

DISADVANTAGES OF THE LOCAL EXCHANGE PLAN

The local exchange plan does not necessarily lead to a new sense of purpose for local governments.  It only increases the amount of maintenance activities the state performs on local roads in turn for using local forces for specific state level duties.  While conditions will likely improve, it in no way is going to provide the same level of maintenance that the state offers.  It does not pay for a county engineer or PTOE, and it does not change local policy.  Since the state is not actually maintaining these roads, state engineers would not be supervising maintenance once the state has "paid back" local agencies with an equivalent amount of work.

A local exchange option was discussed previously in the Minimal Maintenance Plan as an option to offset added costs for targeted programs.  While it was not mandatory in that plan, it is essentially being expanded on here as a potential solution to local road deficiencies.  While far from a perfect plan, it is essentially the only plan being discussed here that will not require any redistribution or increase in funding.

This plan also needs to prioritize the engineering, installation and maintenance of safety devices over other maintenance needs as a means of making sure that the funding exchanged is being used to maintain these adequately on a local level in all participating agencies.  The local exchange plan is designed to improve on each agency's weaknesses, and if these weaknesses are not focused properly then the benefit would be marginal.  For instance, a local agency maintaining signs on a state road in turn for a state mowing local roads would have far less benefit than the same reversed with neither doing nearly as good of a job.  In this case, the local agency would lower the standards on the state-owned road while the state would only be mowing a couple local roads.

Pennsylvania's road system also is not completely uniform.  Their agility agreements do not adequately budget any work on a local level.  However, this tool has allowed the state to begin mandating that state and MUTCD standards are followed especially when agility funding is used.  Over the the 17 years it has been in place, the agility program has made a big difference, but there are still problem areas waiting for funding to correct.  This means that a local exchange rule would still need to be coupled with a state mandate that local governments begin to comply with proper standards: likely not popular in states where payments to local governments are already low and state control ratios do not adequately cover local road maintenance needs.  This means that in order for the system to be most effective, local exchange agreements should either be applied in large counties or in states with large state road networks.

THE LOCAL EXCHANGE PLAN IN RELATION TO OTHER PLANS

The local exchange plan does not have to work independently of any of the other plans proposed.  In fact, it works quite well with all of them as long as local funding and control ratios are at adequate levels to offer any substantial benefit to local governments.  Let's look at how it works in relation to these other plans:

Regional Road Maintenance

The example above demonstrated that the local exchange plan works beautifully with the regional plan, when properly executed, considering that regional districts are essentially multi-county and city units who will themselves have enough responsibility and geography consolidated under their control that a partnership between the states and regions would provide far greater benefit than it would with a city or county.

Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan

In this plan, more rural, lower population cooperative agencies would heavily benefit from providing labor-intensive routine maintenance on state roads within their region in turn for the state providing traffic control services on behalf of the region.  While the cooperative may be able to afford to hire a PTOE to handle that responsibility, the revenue streams may be inadequate to maintain roads to proper levels without some additional state-aid.  While it would be most beneficial for rural cooperatives to maintain both farm-to-market roads and state-owned roads, this method might work where the state does not wish to contract out responsibility with another agency for state-owned roads.

CONCLUSION

Adopted from Pennsylvania's agility program, the local exchange plan is not a guarantee of universally higher standards on local roads, but it provides a means for local agencies to exchange maintenance activities with the state as a means of saving money, better distributing resources, addressing weaknesses and providing higher levels of maintenance on local roads and streets without any increase in cost or reorganization required.  The main advantage, however, is that it does not require major structural changes to the road system and does not require any increase in funding to execute.  In all, it should be offered in far more states but is most effective in states with larger state control ratios or regional cooperative systems already in place.

The major purpose of a local exchange program should be to provide technical services, help finance costly equipment, correct deficiencies in traffic safety improvements while allowing states to eliminate a duplication of services on less complex, but more difficult to organize activities such as winter maintenance, summer mowing and pothole patching.  The goal should be to at least work toward unifying all road standards statewide without increasing costs or disrupting the balance of power between state and local agencies.

Rethinking Local Maintenance: Returning to a Larger Statewide Role is the Best Strategy

The facts and figures do not lie.  Money is tight, and it's too tight for most local governments to properly finance or maintain roads in much of the country.  Rural counties in particular are finding budgets strained due to weakened economies and population losses, yet they remain responsible for roads that they have never had adequate resources to maintain in the first place.  When money is tight, the first line of action is to reduce overhead by sharing that responsibility with another public agency whether it is the state, an adjacent county, a city or any combination of these.  Why is this not being done?

Transportation demands today are also not the same as they were 100 years ago.  While the states may feel overwhelmed, the use of an antiquated method of service delivery is reducing flexibility and accountability on how funding is spent, draining state coffers for needless overhead costs due to the duplication of services and leading to a dearth of inspectors to make sure that maintenance and road projects are in compliance with sound engineering practice.  Even with their many great financial difficulties, the highly centralized road systems in the Carolinas, Virginia, Delaware and West Virginia still work, and they do because overhead costs are minimalized meaning that the most basic of maintenance needs are almost always met even if larger needs have suffered from a maintenance backlog.  In fact, the only real reason that the road systems in the Carolinas and Virginia are not among the top rated road systems in the country has much to do with politics: the states that have them are unwilling to invest in adequate tax rates to maintain them and are funneling sparse resources away from maintenance to large road projects and other non-road items.  At present, only North Carolina's road system is adequately funded since legislative gridlock has resulted in a refusal to introduce new funding sources to pay for roads in the other states with centralized road systems mentioned.

In contrast, the only states with local systems that work are states with either a very strong investment from a state level and/or very large counties that help better consolidate funding.  In other words, road systems like those that exist in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, Tennessee and Kansas need to go.  It's time to find a better way than simply relying on a patchwork of local governments to do what they're supposed to do.  County, township and municipal governments when they were laid out were not designed with road maintenance standards in consideration.  They were formed before the automobile and have absolutely no basis in modern highway planning.  Most were never capable of managing their own highway departments independently.  In the nearly 100 years since state highway systems were first created, it should be pretty obvious by now that local highway agencies are a costly, inefficient organization.  Most are extremely dependent on state-aid to survive, and they do not maintain road systems to adequate levels to justify keeping these organizations in place at the levels they are today.  Just the fact that MUTCD compliance alone is very poor across the country shows that dependence on local governments to do what the state or a larger region can do better is pure stubbornness and misplaced idealism about the real role of local agencies.

A lack of professionalism is epidemic in local agencies, especially rural and poorer agencies who lack the resources to hire professional staff and adequately finance higher standard work.  This sign exemplifies a disregard for standards due to the county being too small to adequately police without any efforts made to place supervision under an agency capable of hiring engineers whose professional training would hopefully reduce sloppy work like this.

An article in Chattanooga's Times-Free Press highlights the difficulties that counties have in both maintaining roads and obtaining adequate funding to do so.  Planners always look at counties with high populations as examples of efficiency in local government and a shining example of local control while completely ignoring that the majority of counties across the US have low populations with tremendous economic difficulties.  While they may provide a public service, they are incapable of providing a well-rounded consistent approach due to an imbalance between available funding and the human resources needed to steer a local operation.  About the only way such counties can support their own road systems is by receiving a high level of state-aid: sometimes way more than larger counties receive.  States may have such programs such as LTAP technical assistance, but they are by no means a guarantee that the local agency is going to follow those standards, especially when it means greatly increasing costs and hiring outside help to do so.  For instance, nowhere in this plan to adjust gas taxes in Georgia were there any plans to reduce the burden on counties or cities.  In all of these counties mentioned, the local governments have roads maintained well below state standards and lack any significant means of raising additional funding.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The last time any serious effort was made to relieve local governments of heavy road responsibility was during the early 1950's.  During that time, the state's role in transportation was a recent invention and states flush with gas tax revenues, less trustful of local governments and less fearful of liability felt they could operate a large portion of the local road network far more efficiently at far higher levels than the individual local governments could.  At the time, the states who adopted such systems were taking over roads in counties that often had very low populations, could not afford to maintain the many new paved roads and were unable to support the new mandated road standards.  Federal-aid funds were also plentiful meaning that these large state takeovers were bundled with a major road building program until funding for such projects was cut beginning in the 1970's.

Unfortunately, most other states did not adapt this strategy when the federal-aid secondary program was fully underway.  Those other states began building massive secondary state highway systems with no intentions of maintaining them.  They were instead dumped on the local governments as soon as the asphalt cooled for the local agencies to maintain without either the funding nor knowledge on how to do so.  Rural counties and small towns in many states were suddenly in charge of these new roads when they were previously in charge of mostly unpaved roads that required neither significant funding nor technical expertise to either build or maintain.  They were not prepared for this new responsibility.

Without substantial state-aid, federal-aid major collector roads such as this one are marginally maintained.  Local governments are typically not properly structured for this duty.

Unfortunately, the rush by the states to take over these new roads was not as strong as it should have been.  Most states across the country have strong local governments that resisted this move by the states, and state DOT's have consistently resisted any new responsibility choosing instead to continue to push more and more responsibility on the counties: both construction AND maintenance.  Traditional local control typically wins over central planning more often than not, because of fears of unfair redistribution of resources to favored parts of the state coupled with a belief that centralization will lead to much higher taxes than decentralization.  While history has proven that this is not necessarily true, there is something to be said about distributing resources across a larger state meaning a far too large state bureaucracy and imbalanced demands.  This is why the Regional Roads Plan was developed.

Local control is idealized in the USA as an extension of "states rights" in this misguided notion that the closer the government is to the people, the more responsive they will be thus the greater likelihood that they will do a better job.  This proved not to be true as many local governments have proven in many cases to be notorious for neglect and waste while even honest, well-meaning local agencies simply lack the know-how because they lacked the means to find out what they were not doing while the state was not willing to tell them due to "home rule" laws.  This is made worse by the states who have small counties or have subdivided county government further into townships, boroughs and villages.  How is a township with 1,200 people going to know how to develop a traffic control plan or cheaply provide any public services on their own?  A traffic control plan would require a budget of as much as $100,000 to engineer and correct.  Pothole maintenance?  Does each town need their own grader, mower, plows and facilities?  Hiring a contractor would also be more expensive than just having multiple towns sharing the cost for these duties.  Most likely they would not even recognize these problems enough to even address them.

State systems could have been much larger than they were, and most states who adopted these large-scale state road systems mostly took an approach of relieving counties and not municipalities considering that most municipal governments are also of very low population.  This wave of state takeovers also largely didn't happen across New England, the upper Midwest, Rocky Mountains States and especially the West Coast.  Townships were completely untouched in all but Pennsylvania and Maine where the states took over at least 1/3 of the highway system.  States like Colorado backtracked on large-scale state takeover strategies early on with Florida, Alabama and Maryland also scaling back enormously in the 1970's and 1980's.  Blind support of local control remains king.

In addition, state DOT's are becoming very stubborn in regards to maintaining roads.  Consider the typical approach of state DOT's today that have nothing to do with actually creating a uniform, efficient and well-maintained road system.  These include:

• Devolution 
• This involves transferring a set amount or proportion of state-owned road mileage to local ownership to both construct and maintain)
• Arbitrary mileage caps 
• State sets a randomly chosen maximum number of miles or lane miles that they are willing to maintain and will not exceed that number
• Does not allow a proportional ratio increase: mileage is set and ratio slowly declines
• City maintenance contracts for state roads
• State DOT entrusts a city to handle most or all routine maintenance on state-owned roads thus defeating the purpose of state control if the standards of the city do not meet or exceed state standards
• Hands-off state-aid safety contracts
• Projects are often as-is upgrades that forbid state inspections to review and make changes for local jobs
• Problems in contracts are never fixed because there is no qualified inspector or PTOE on a local level to review and make changes to plans
• Other moves by the state such as:
• Leaving the entire planning of farm-to-market routes to the local government thus destroying the ability to properly connect roads to facilitate traffic across the state
• Removing all directional guide signs and trailblazers directing traffic onto locally-owned collector and arterial roads meant to reduce liability on the state for traffic leaving the state system even if the road is otherwise properly constructed, properly maintained and is the shortest/best route
• Inflexibility on unusually strict state standards that have nothing to do with safety designed expressly to force local governments to take over maintenance of stretches of road either just to get a road project completed that the state is unwilling to fund or because the project has conflicting priorities for roadway design that is not 100% in compliance with established state policy

All of the items listed above are primarily just an excuse for state DOT's to try to get out of the road maintenance business.  State DOT's are not a private for-profit corporation.  They are supposed to be representing the public good and work to make the road system better even if it means regulating, reducing or even eliminating direct local control on much of the road system.  They are the experts that state authorities defer to when transportation policy is formed, and if their policy was for higher standards or a greater state role with a reasonable plan, it is likely that the state government would listen to them over any other voices.  The attitude is instead increasingly becoming a view that the state should be exempt from any liability and that the state "cannot handle any more roads" as if that arbitrary mileage cap they set is some outrageous sum that is overwhelming the entire operation.  If they told the state government that turning certain responsibilities to local governments directly would most certainly lead to unsafe conditions but that they could help local agencies develop a regional cooperative approach to road maintenance, the state government would probably listen.

It is not that the states do not have the money to maintain a larger state highway system.  What it is is that they simply want to build roads and not actually have to maintain them doling out that responsibility instead to contractors and local governments.  The state DOT's themselves are also working against a strategy that brings better road standards to a far larger percentage of roads.  A big part of the proposals on this site are a way to work around this negative, short-sighted attitude by state highway agencies.  The hope is that if the state wants out of the road business that a middle ground can be developed between the larger state and smaller local agencies that can bridge that gap so that road quality is not sacrificed in the name of right-sizing state government.

WHAT SHOULD THE STATES BE DOING?

Today, the strategy should be more methodical.  Having states completely take over local road networks is no longer a practical or reliable strategy.  Nevertheless, complete control of roads on a municipal or county level should be reduced heavily.  Two approaches must be considered:

• In the first approach, states should be taking over technical matters from local governments through the following ways:
• An expansion of the state DOT in partnership with local agencies where local agencies jointly fund the state system expansion for maintenance while retaining control of construction funding
• An expansion of the state DOT into a farm-to-market system with the state providing routine maintenance only, but limiting local government authority to both construct and maintain roads that are actually local in function
• Swapping services with local agencies by providing technical services (traffic control planning, installation and limited maintenance) in turn for local agencies providing non-technical services (surface maintenance, mowing/brush cutting, winter maintenance)
• The second approach has the state DOT not involved in local matters, but the state itself brokers a deal that encourages and allows local agencies across the state to form interagency maintenance cooperatives
• This is combined on either a regional (based on regional planning districts) or statewide level (a statewide local roads cooperative)
• May be combined for full road maintenance or traffic control
• States should provide funding for engineering and operations as not only an incentive for local agencies to join a cooperative, but also as a means to combat local agency avoidance due to an operations fee that would be required otherwise

The federal-aid highway system in this country consists of 24% of the entire nation's highway system and roads of a functional classification higher than local comes to 30%, so an average of 19% is not excessive for state responsibility.  In fact, it is far too low when small cities and counties are otherwise responsible for 81% of the roads in the nation.  The chart below shows the federal-aid system mileage and ratios for the entire US.

The functional classifications of the US consists of five classifications, four of those which are eligible for federal-aid funding.  The federal-aid system consists of 24% of the nation's highway system with an additional 7% considered collector although not eligible for federal-aid.

The reality is that local governments have two primary functions: schools and roads.  Neither school nor road systems could even survive in such rural areas without constant state or federal aid, and that funding is never enough to bring either schools nor roads to acceptable standards except in newer states who did not adopt a 19th century model of local government.  Both schools and roads take a significant percentage of local funds, and neither roads nor schools benefit if the pie is carved up into small pieces when populations within those pieces of the pie are not very large.  If a state has 100 counties, and the average population is 20,000, the roads and schools in those counties below that average are going to have a difficult time meeting goals and standards.  Both are also grossly inefficient and substandard in areas with low populations or excessive government fragmentation such as in states who have both counties and townships.  If these local agencies were heavily sharing resources while maintaining primary local control it would make a big difference.  Is it such a bad idea to have regional school districts or regional road districts comprised of multiple cities, towns or counties?  Even some states or portions of states could adopt this strategy where the states are very small in land area such as in New England.  Our black and white state and local division is not an efficient use of resources.  That gray area should be full of cooperation to lower costs and improve standards.

WHY COMBINING LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES IS NOT THE ANSWER TO THIS PROBLEM

It has often been suggested that boundaries should be erased and that townships should be eliminated, counties merged or cities dissolved, but how often does this really happen?  Lots of talk has been given to this issue, but talk is cheap.  People like boundaries whether or not that boundary provides any actual services.  If you say you live in the town of Holtsville in Holt Township in Fairfield County, does it really matter if Holtsville, Holt Township or even Fairfield County provide every public service on their own or any at all?  Does it even matter if they exist except on paper?  North Carolina and South Carolina are full of townships, but they have no active government and provide no services.  It doesn't mean they do not exist.

People like their boundaries, so providing public services across borders where it makes sense is the ideal approach.  Other than that, the highest likelihood of local government reform, in fact, is the dissolving of townships in states who have active county governments duplicating services with townships.  The discussion of merging counties and eliminating low population municipalities, however, never gains sufficient traction to truly provide any benefit.  It is, in fact, a weak argument when most people do not support a complete loss of local control or identity.

Ideally, townships should be mostly dissolved, the formation and/or annexation of new cities and towns highly restricted, smaller cities and towns merged with adjacent larger ones or dissolved and counties should be a fluid function that is designed to efficiently reduce costs for the state.  On the last item, counties as functional entities should have no less than 100,000 residents effectively forcing low population counties to merge to form very large counties.  At this point, none of those ideas are either realistic or popular.  Was it realistic when Fulton County, GA merged with two other counties?  Today, the entire county is divided into 15 cities with county-level municipal services effectively dissolved meaning that local government consolidation was ultimately worthless.  What is realistic, however, is reorganizing specific government functions so that the role of counties, cities and towns is greatly reduced as a means to cut costs, improve standards and greatly increase spending power.

CONCLUSION

While no strategy is guaranteed to create a smooth, perfect road system, the concepts presented will help to eliminate structural inefficiency and poor standards that are directly the result of roadway responsibility divided up among too many parties.  While none of the ideas above involve a complete state takeover of any road, the strategies are designed to make sure that no road is left behind.  The solutions are common sense strategies, because they right-size responsibility so that not just roads but certain roadway functions are given to the public agency who is best equipped to handle it.  The concepts above also summarize and group together several of the main ideas from more detailed proposals discussed in earlier posts.  The idea is to use existing resources at existing levels and reorganize them in a way that is more beneficial.  All of these ideas are designed with the intent into permanently altering the relationship of states and local governments so that the traditional and ineffective division of responsibilities between states and very small local units of government is replaced with a larger, more engineer-driven system that creates universally higher standards at the least cost.

Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan Spotlight: Georgia

[This post is written as an example of the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Maintenance Plan]

Georgia's policies in regards to local government funding are a complicated issue when it comes to how they are funded.  Not only does GDOT not distribute any funding directly to counties or cities (via guaranteed annual payouts), but the ratio of state-aid to counties is still quite low.  Most local governments, in fact, are expected to raise the majority of local funding through property taxes or penny sales tax referendums, and this issue has recently become contentious since many counties are raiding funding to pay for everything but roads and/or have become completely dependent on sales taxes for both construction and maintenance.  In addition, not all counties are able to raise ample revenues through this method.  When such referendums fail, county roads fall further into disrepair since GDOT funding to local agencies does not keep pace with local funding or needs.  GDOT has also heavily cut staff and privatized many operations over the years as a means of continuing to adequately finance the state's 18,000 mile state highway system.  So where do the counties and cities turn when they want the state to turn more county roads into state highways, but GDOT refuses to do so?

GEORGIA HAS TOO MANY COUNTIES MAINTAINING TOO MANY ROADS

First, GDOT is in a complicated position.  Unlike Alabama, Georgia has far too many counties to adequately and effectively fund high-cost local government functions like roads.  Even if funding were at ideal levels, it would never be enough nor would it be cost efficient to develop a state DOT type organization with engineers and a full highway operation in every county.  Can you imagine the costs involved in paying for 159 counties to do this?  The state has also largely devolved most responsibility to counties and cities for decades with nearly 86% of the roads in the state under local control meaning higher costs for far less maintenance.

 This is why the state has so far continued to operate a grossly inefficient state highway system.  The state has neither created a plan to transfer more roadways (and funding) to local governments nor have they been willing to discuss transferring more roadways to state control.  However, the state unfortunately continues to maintain a "devolution by evolution" policy (mileage cap) since 1963 that has reduced the ratio of state control by over 5% since its inception.  States like Alabama, in contrast, have fewer, larger counties meaning that the state can afford to finance county engineers and transfer a larger ratio of responsibility to counties.  While it is not a perfect system, what Alabama has achieved would simply not be effective or efficient anywhere in Georgia thus why the regional roads plan was the first proposed alternative for Georgia.  While still a good idea, most state and local leaders are frightened by this untested idea.  They really shouldn't be.  The farm-to-market cooperative plan is a compromise for those cold-feeted politicians who bristle at the mention of consolidation of services.

Local governments are already falling short in maintenance of former state routes periodically turned to local control by the inflexible mileage cap.  This means that roads that have never been under state control are far worse in terms of maintenance funding and standards.  Much of these issues can be fixed through the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan.

Local governments in Georgia also have a very murky history when it comes to being grouped together for anything.  Shared service agreements are rare and have a high failure rate.  Furthermore, regional cooperation in large metropolitan areas like Atlanta is virtually non-existent.  The state has also shown no interest in relieving rural counties of maintenance as a means to improve the situation with local governments who lack sufficient resources to meet or exceed state-level road maintenance services.  However, GDOT is also well aware of the deficiencies on local roads steering federal-aid safety funding to help counties upgrade safety problems.  The state has also centralized state funding for local maintenance projects since 1978.  While these programs have helped preserve pavement quality and have done much to upgrade substandard traffic operations, they are far from enough to assure that these roads will ever meet and exceed state and federal standards.  Too many safety problems exist on local roads, and much of that has to do with the way responsibility is distributed among so many counties and municipalities for local connecting roads.

Due to mileage caps, major roads such as this one in Cobb County and even a few freeways remain under local control.  These roads often have substandard maintenance and need a more centralized approach to manage maintenance and better distribute traffic patterns.

LOCAL FUNDING DISTRIBUTION SPREAD TOO THIN

Another problem with the current system having so many small local governments is that funding distribution will always be spread too thin even with existing programs involving redistributing of state funds onto a local level.  The economies of scale are not there, the trained personnel are not there and the tremendous overhead costs for running so many local agencies is taking money away from the roads themselves.  Local governments are also in charge of 53% of higher functional classification roads (including 36% of federal-aid eligible roads) meaning that more than half of the most costly to construct and maintain roads are completely under local responsibility.  Local governments have repeatedly indicated that they lack the resources to maintain these roads and continuously rely on state grants instead of local funds to repair and maintain these roads.  These are also barriers to the creation of the proposed Traffic Control Cooperative Plan in that the operations fees required to cooperate will still be higher than what each local government agency is willing to pay.  The Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan, however, distributes maintenance costs among the counties and cities for these remaining highways that GDOT will not accept into their own system to keep construction funding and costs local while providing the economies of scale needed to bring the remaining highways to standards comparable to GDOT.

The chart above shows that Georgia's state road responsibility falls short of federal-aid responsibility by nearly 10,000 miles.  The combined ratio of federal-aid road responsibility in Georgia comes to 21.8%.  When the mileage cap for state maintenance was set in 1963, the state ratio was around 20% leaving an unfunded mandate gap of 5% today for local governments to deal with.  While the state system could also be expanded to cover the gap, a cooperative plan could also be brokered statewide to cover these roads possibly dropping the state's responsibility so that the state responsibility is more evenly divided.

LOCAL FUNDING ISSUES AND WHY THE COOPERATIVE APPROACH IS BETTER

The chart above demonstrates the gap between the entire network of federal-aid eligible roads and the state's responsibility.  In the early 1960's, the gray area was very small, but it has continued to expand placing counties in charge of close to 10,000 miles of farm-to-market roads.  This gap needs to be filled with something other than the 159 different counties and cities within performing this job alone.

Nonetheless, simply taking over these roads as state roads is not so simple.  Georgia's local funding issues are complicated.  Funding for a full state secondary system is inadequate under current levels.  Most likely it would require either a huge sales or gas tax increase, road taxes dedicated only to roads by law and/or a substantial reduction in spending per mile on a state level on roadways of lower classification.  Of course, all of this fails for a simple and unfortunate reason: GDOT does not want to maintain hardly any roads anymore and the ratio of state responsibility will continue to drop 1%-2% every 10 years as the state continues to grow while the state road system doesn't.  While Georgia raised their gas tax significantly with a local option gas tax available to local governments, this does not take into account the issues that are present with over 600 different local agencies in charge with widely varying populations and standards.  Is enough funding available to transfer these roads to the state?  If so, would the counties and cities suffer financially for their other roads?

At most 10,000 miles could be added to the existing state highway system if the existing ratio of funding set aside for local programs was instead used to a finance a larger state highway system.  A transfer like this would leave local agencies entirely dependent on local or state-aid funding with state control ratios increased only 7.5%, but an increase in this ratio would effectively erase local access to federal-aid funding.  This would still be an unacceptable situation for the local governments across the state, however, because it would keep too much of the local system inefficiently structured as well as robbing local governments of federal-aid to maintain their remaining road system.  Unless local option gas/sales taxes became permanent and state-aid to counties and cities was expanded further to remaining local roads, this would simply not work.  This increase would also be insufficient to correct deficient local road standards on other local connecting roads.

An Alternative that Shares Responsibility for Farm-To-Market Roads

The farm-to-market cooperative approach creates a two-tiered system.  It establishes primary state routes that should always remain state-owned due to the high costs associated with maintaining them and then it establishes a farm-to-market system in which limited statewide maintenance is handled by the state DOT, another state agency or an interagency cooperative.  Preferably the arrangement is that an interagency cooperative handles road maintenance then contracts with GDOT to provide routine maintenance of state roads as a means of reverse contracting.

A farm-to-market approach should, however, include more than just federal-aid eligible roads.  In fact, this is the drawback to expanding the state highway system to cover those roads.  Local agencies in Georgia realistically need at least 35%-40% of their road system maintained by either the state or some other collective road agency allowing the road system to be distributed to the agency best capable of doing a good job maintaining them.

This chart shows the full functional classifications for roads in Georgia.  When non-federal-aid minor collectors are added in, the ratio of roads not considered functionally local climbs to 30.9%.  When considering that up to 5% of the other roads that are functionally local are built to highway standards, this means that overall that roadways important enough to be managed by an agency other than the individual counties and cities jumps to around 36%.

The main proposal describes the cooperative approach where a statewide contract is drafted and ratified by the majority of county and municipal agencies to allow resources to be combined for a farm-to-market road system.  Without state-aid, it would likely be more beneficial if entire rural road systems transferred to the cooperative, but it may also be possible to establish a financial arrangement where a group of multiple counties and cities (based on federal planning region boundaries) are relieved of direct maintenance through a multi-agency contract that does not require legislative approval.  However, this change depends very strongly on contract laws in Georgia.  If counties and cities are forbidden to make such arrangements, such arrangement will require legislative approval thus making the creation of a new state agency handling farm-to-market road maintenance more beneficial.

The Georgia roads budget (as of 2014) provides $122,470,000 for the Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) program or 12% of the state budget.  If the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan was adopted, this might affect this funding.  This is because this plan, if adopted with existing state funds, would have to come from one of three sources:

• a portion of this same LMIG funding
• a portion of the state maintenance budget
• or a small gas tax increase 

However, Georgia is actually one of the best financed road systems in the country where if overall efficiency was streamlined and road funds were not diverted to other non-road uses, the state could more than easily afford to either provide funding to a regional cooperative for operations or assume routine maintenance of a very large number of roads maintained by cities and counties.  Likewise, counties and cities have been provided adequate revenues by the state that they could afford to transfer certain roads to a statewide agency for limited routine maintenance.  The best of both worlds is a state and local funding match to make this possible.  The state funding match comes from the state providing funding for maintenance of the farm-to-market system while the local agencies remain completely in charge of capital projects.  As is evidenced by most local roads in Georgia today, those of higher functional classification are in good enough condition to become part of a farm-to-market highway network.  It is not so much that there is not enough pie.  It is that the slice is too thin to satisfy the needs of local governments.  

OUTLINE OF THE FARM-TO-MARKET PLAN IN GEORGIA

Since Georgia has, in fact, increased the gas tax it will simplify this situation.  It is time now to set aside a wider chunk of the budget to help local governments not just for road projects but also for routine maintenance.  The beauty of this plan is that it allows the system to be properly tiered so that it works more effectively for each level of government.  Its arrangement is as follows:

1. State Highways (GDOT-owned, maintained and constructed)
• These roads should be adjusted to cover only 12.5% of the highway system (ratio cap) with a proposed mileage around 15,600 miles
• This reduces state mileage by 2,500 miles effectively eliminating the majority of the state's farm-to-market responsibility so that it can be distributed to the farm-to-market system instead
2. Farm-To-Market Roads (locally-owned, routine maintenance by either GDOT or statewide/regional cooperative agency, roads constructed with local funds)
• Routine maintenance is provided by GDOT, a state farm-to-market roads agency or a regional cooperative established based on the state's 12 planning districts created as a joint effort between the planning commissions and affected local agencies
• These roads should cover all remaining federal-aid eligible roads (9.3% of the highway system)
• This system should also cover a proportion of roads not eligible for federal-aid with the combination of farm-to-market miles set at a ratio cap of 22.5% of the highway system
• This total farm-to-market mileage comes up to around 28,000 miles
• Funded with a combination of federal-aid, limited state-aid and local funding
• Sum of state highways and farm-to-market roads comes to 35% of the overall road system
• The statewide or regional cooperative may be contracted for at least some routine maintenance activities along state highways reducing GDOT maintenance responsibility 
3. Local Roads (locally-owned, locally maintained, constructed by local agency)
• These are roadways of a local functional classification not included on the farm-to-market highway system
• They are not eligible for federal-aid and are generally not constructed to acceptable standards to function as a highway
• 65% of the highway system would be classified as a local road
• Local road maintenance may be contracted to a statewide or regional cooperative, but this would be done at their own expense
• Local roads cannot be included as farm-to-market mileage even if the roads are contracted to a statewide or regional cooperative

Through this farm-to-market plan, high maintenance standards can be expanded to over 20,000 miles of roads with little to no increase in local-aid spending by the state or local agencies for maintenance in lieu of a large increase via a complete state takeover of thousands of miles of new highways.  While the transfer of around 2,400 miles from the state system to the farm-to-market system is not necessary to make this plan work, doing so will help better funnel costs to the farm-to-market system by transferring state highways of low importance to a level where they will fall under a primarily local construction responsibility.  This way GDOT will be focused only on roads they are best suited for: arterial and truck routes while other highways will not be forgotten.

Highways of low importance such as SR 255 in Habersham County would likely transfer from the state system to the farm-to-market system.  These roads have few needs beyond resurfacing and routine maintenance, which falls more in line with the plan to have the state or a statewide agency provide limited maintenance while construction responsibility is transferred to a local level.

APPLYING THE COOPERATIVE MAINTENANCE PLAN IN GEORGIA

The commitment to this program on a state level needs to be very high in Georgia.  With better revenues than either South Carolina or Alabama, the state's control ratio of only 14.3% is grossly inadequate for the needs of the state when the only alternative for road maintenance of the state's remaining roads is counties and municipalities.  As a fast-growing state with 10,000,000 people and a budget absent federal funding of more than $1 billion, local roads should not be in the substandard condition they are in.  The mileage that the state needs to take over routine maintenance on farm-to-market roads needs to be in the range of 10,000 miles up to 25,000 miles in addition to the current 18,000 miles.  This means that the amount of roads receiving routine maintenance by the state would grow from the existing 14.3% to between 22% and 35% of the highway system: more than adequate to cover every connecting road in the state while keeping the most local roads and streets directly under maintenance of county and city forces.  Let's look at how this is funded:

• At $2,500 per mile, 10,000 miles of routine maintenance are funded on the farm-to-market system requiring $25,000,000 (2% of the state DOT budget).  The ratio is 22% state/farm-to-market.
• At $2,500 per mile, 26,000 miles of routine maintenance are funded on the farm-to-market system requiring $65,000,000 (6.5% of the state DOT budget).  The ratio is 35% state/farm-to-market.
• While counties and cities will be relieved of all routine maintenance of these roads, they will likely suffer a loss of half to 2/3 of LMIG funding to finance this road system without any adjustments or funding increases made elsewhere
• In general, a new funding source such as an ad valorem tax or local taxes should be paid into the system to balance out costs with the state contributing no more than half
• This can still be funded if the state contributes nothing at all, but will require a greater local commitment and a high level of participation from local partner agencies
• Fortunately, the increase in the state gas tax will balance out these losses in addition to the local option gas taxes.  Preferably a portion of the gas tax increase should simply be set aside for this purpose.
• If some of the existing state road funds used for other purposes were returned to state road purposes, the funding for this program could be made available without any cuts to local governments or to the state-owned highway system budget
• If cuts are required, however, the state could consider a transfer of less important state highways to the farm-to-market system (with total state and state-maintained local mileage unchanged) as a means to change the funding ratio to local governments so that the local funding ratio is increased
• The state highway reduction would include a transfer of 2,500-3,500 miles from the state highway system to the state-aid local highway system to bring state-owned roads more in line with roadways of statewide function.
• Transfer of these roads to the state-aid system includes at most 1-1.5 cents of the gas tax 

Another option would be to consider a mileage-based fee to cover the costs of farm-to-market funding:

• Another funding option would be the creation of a flat fee to cover the program
• The flat ad valorem maintenance fee would be mileage fee assessed on all motorists of no more than $5 per vehicle netting a significant portion needed for state-aid maintenance depending on the agreed ratio cap. 
• All local agencies should be required to match up to 50% of funding for the program based on jurisdictional population ratio to state population ratio

EXECUTION OF THE COOPERATIVE MAINTENANCE PLAN IN GEORGIA

After adjustments to funding are made, the new farm-to-market system would begin the process of assuming control of up to 26,000 additional miles that were previously maintained exclusively by local forces.  However, local governments would still own these roads and would be responsible for funding major capital improvements beyond the routine maintenance activities defined in this program.  With statewide forces only providing limited maintenance on this system, it is still up to the counties and cities to finance everything else.

While the mileage cap could be retained for state primary routes, farm-to-market routes should be set on a ratio cap.  This means that mileage is only allowed to proportionally increase based on growth of the highway system.  This means if total mileage (125,523 as of 2013) increases to 130,000 miles then the secondary system mileage would subsequently increase from the initial 10,000-18,000 miles of farm-to-market roads to between 10,356 and 18,642 miles of farm-to-market roads keeping with the original total system ratio (22%-35%).  In addition, the system could be phased in slowly over a 2-3 year span to make sure that funding is adequate for initial upgrades.  This will also allow for adjustment of tax and funding mechanisms for both the state and local governments.

In all, roads should be added to the system in order of functional classification.  They include:

• Arterial and Major Collector Roads [9,746 miles] (7.8%)
• Non-Federal-Aid Minor Collectors and Urban Collectors [10,969 miles] (8.8%)
• Rural Local Connecting Roads [5,146 miles] (4.1%)

It should be noted in this total that unpaved or unimproved minor collector roads and collector streets in cities may be swapped for better constructed local connecting roads.  In addition, local connecting roads should only be added to the system if they are in a rural area.  Functionally local roads in urban areas should not be on the farm-to-market system.  If they are already on the system, they should be truncated to the urban boundary or removed if the urban boundary absorbs the entire length of the road.

The scope of this system as proposed is shown below with specific rules that make sure that farm-to-market mileage is only used on the roads that need it the most.  Additional criteria for rural local connecting roads is shown in the list below:

This chart shows proposed criteria for establishing road priorities on farm-to-market roads

WHAT ABOUT JUST TAKING OVER THESE ROADS AS FULL STATE-OWNED SECONDARIES?

The main purpose of the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan is to relieve counties and cities of direct maintenance duties on all higher functional classification roads by consolidating management and costs for those roads under fewer agencies with a more engineer-driven approach.  While cost savings will certainly be realized, it is the creation of higher standards at little to no cost increase that is the advantage of this approach.  In addition, applying a cooperative approach to this plan means local agencies are not required to follow state standards for construction activities, local funding levels remain high enough to preserve local investment and local control is retained.  While this will help counties, especially rural, save money and have better local road standards it does not completely relieve them of the responsibility for these roads.  A full state-owned secondary road system with only construction responsibility given to local governments is more ideal, but it will take at least one of two things: all transportation funding dedicated to transportation and/or a new revenue source.  While the new revenue source is available with high local taxes, an increase of federal-aid or political will to transfer a greater percentage of funding to state system expansion will be required, and this plan minimizes the required investment for that purpose while maximizing the mileage that can be placed on such a system.  It also creates a means to have an agency on the same functional level as the state provide limited maintenance on roadways not eligible for federal-aid since they will not be responsible for larger costs involved.

If the present funding was used to create a secondary state system, it would require a huge new financial commitment for the state, and the major funding source they would need is currently entrusted to counties: sales taxes.  For 28,000 miles of additional state-owned secondary state roads, between $224,000,000 and $280,000,000 would be needed for a funding of $8,000-$10,000 per mile.  For 40,000 miles, that number would jump to $320,000,000 to $400,000,000.  Based on the current budget, this would increase the state financial responsibility for these currently local roads from the current 12% to between 22 and 40% with nothing left over for local governments.  This would also cut deeply into funding for new road construction considering that this amount will demand a quarter to nearly half of the funding made available through the tax increase.  Either way, this would be a huge new cost for the state although costs could be offset through better cost efficiency, federal-aid payments or higher taxes.

Much lower costs per mile are not the only advantage of the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan.  A full-scale secondary state highway system has its challenges.  These problems include:

• A diversion of a much higher percentage of taxes away from road projects to maintenance which will require an even greater financial commitment from the state to fund
• A loss of federal-aid funding to local agencies
• A complete loss of local control to all but roadways of low importance
• Georgia has to taken on many more miles than the state maintains currently
• State responsibility may include roads that are not eligible for federal-aid funding
• Cities will lose control of major roads through historic districts unless gaps in these routes are created or complicated concessions are made with the state

Overall, cooperation between agencies in Georgia has a poor track record.  With urban planners frequently pushing for more control over the design of urban corridors, this means that fewer roads in built up areas like this will be able to be state maintained.  GDOT will also fight this plan due to the added liability of completely owning these roads.  With far more limited responsibility by local governments, local investment on remaining roads will be weak meaning that either local road standards may ultimately become worse and/or local roadways will be overbuilt.  Many counties in Georgia will also need the option to transfer much or all local maintenance to the state due to the excess costs of operating a local street department coupled with greatly reduced revenues to maintain them.  

Most of these issues evaporate when GDOT has limited to no responsibility for otherwise centralized farm-to-market roads.  While GDOT may ultimately be contracted to provide limited routine maintenance to farm-to-market roads, the use of a separate state agency or an interlocal cooperative of all of the counties and cities across the state could make this possible without GDOT playing any direct role.  In fact, very little state-aid may be required at all in comparison to if the state took over those roads.

This strategy presents a balanced approach largely working within existing funding where local agencies are largely relieved of road maintenance duties on a very high number of roads while retaining powers to plan and finance construction.  This is why maintenance functions are limited on this system so that counties and cities can still plan and use the greater portion of available funding on capital projects while sharing costs for routine maintenance as a means of creating higher efficiency and better road standards through a single agency funded jointly.  It is hoped that this strategy will bring the quality and balance that Georgia needs to truly have the best maintained road system.