Lessons Learned from Alabama's Captive County Fiasco: Advice for Virginia, North and South Carolina

Sometimes the best laid plans fail.  It is not from lack of results or lack of effort, but usually these plans fail because either just enough people are not happy with the results of that plan or the approach taken is not fair to all parties involved.  While the storm has quieted down at present in Virginia over devolution of its state controlled county road system, the battle still rages in South Carolina where the state has strongly considered devolving responsibility for at least half of its current state-owned road system mileage as a means of forcing counties and cities to fund roads that are not federal-aid thus are lower in regional importance.  While fair skies permeate the Mid-Atlantic states at the moment for state-controlled county roads, the devolution threat still looms in the coming years.  North Carolina's roads are also slipping in pavement quality, and Virginia still has a long climb back after neglecting to fund its road system prior to 2012.  Another outbreak of devolution mania is likely to ensue with neither North Carolina nor Virginia able to adequately meet the demands of these two fast growing states.  Although at least 35% of the roads are in poor condition in all three states, that doesn't mean the same bad idea used in 35 other states does not need to be adopted in these states.

Roads such as Simmons Gap Road (Rt. 628) pictured here in Albemarle County, VA have an uncertain future in terms of the state continuing to maintain their roads.  The debate over the state's role in what would otherwise be a county maintained road in other states is never over as long as states fall behind on maintenance and roadway improvements.

THE CAPTIVE COUNTY STORY: A LESSON IN FUNCTIONAL CONSOLIDATION FAILURES

Alabama's "captive counties" were born in a period of progressive fiscal policy where state involvement in local road maintenance was much higher than today.  While Alabama has larger counties than many other Southeastern states, these counties are still low in population and have a high percentage of residents with lower incomes.  How "captive counties" began was in the 50's when corruption on a local level was very rampant.  Instead of a countywide road structure where all road maintenance was centralized in one single unit, counties were continuously splitting up road responsibility across special road districts.  The result was that these counties began to accrue massive debt.  At the time, the state felt that the only strategy that would work was to take complete control of the worst counties thus unifying the counties' road responsibilities under state authority.  All equipment, facilities and employees were then seized by the state and the newly "captive" counties were required to pay the state their share of highway user revenues (known as a "bookkeeping fee") to maintain roads in their counties.  A portion of that fund was used to pay off the debt with the remainder used for the state to maintain county roads.  These captive counties also made the cities within captive meaning that all roads in the county taken over by the Alabama Highway Department (now ALDOT) included those within the municipalities Alabama Highway Department.

A map of the controversial "captive counties" in Alabama

When the state was through seizing its picks of captive counties, the total was 10 counties although one source has stated there were once 13 captive counties.  These ten counties included 9 in Northern Alabama and one in Southern Alabama.  The ten counties were Lauderdale, Colbert, Franklin, Winston, Lawrence, Cullman, Jackson, DeKalb, Cherokee and Baldwin.  Most counties were seized by 1955 with Colbert County seized in 1965.  When the counties became "captive", the status was always left open-ended to allow for an eventual return to local control after the debt was paid.  After that was accomplished, voters would decide via a referendum whether to "free" the counties to maintain their own roads.  A funny thing happened, though, in that this penal strategy for corrupt counties became popular: especially with county officials.  People began to see that the state was doing a better job than the counties were able to do for routine maintenance and subsequent referendums were not resulting in the turning back of those roads.  

The existence of captive counties was controversial from the start.  It was joined by a Dillon's Rule culture that made the state directly responsible for county needs, and even the "free" counties received maintenance from the state.  It is not known if there were voluntary contracts, but it does appear that aside from the 10 captive counties, that several other "free" counties still contracted part or all of their road maintenance services to the state at-will.  All of this irked many who believed that the system was patently unfair giving financial advantages to "free" counties, and this was enhanced by strong home rule advocates such as former governor Fob James.  Lauderdale County fought the hardest to reform the system, and a referendum was put forth in 1963 asking voters to take back their roads not even a decade after the system was adopted.  Moreover, the state did not permit counties to make any decisions or have access to funding on county roads captive to the state, and it was commonly said that funding formulas were placing captive counties at a disadvantage.  This was worsened by the cheap construction techniques used to pave captive county roads.  The system was dominated by roads paved with nothing more than a thin layer of double surface treatment (tar and gravel) that, while an improvement over dirt roads, got into bad shape quickly.  

 

With the state unable to raise revenues adequately to improve the worsening road conditions, the fight escalated 20 years after the system was created.  This imbalance of funding remains an issue today in the states that control county roads: the counties are either unable or unwilling to raise funds to help advance state work.  Some exceptions do exist in several counties in Virginia, however, who have created construction agreements that speed up road projects that would otherwise go unfunded.

In 1975, Lauderdale County came up with a solution for the Captive issue.  The way the system was structured gave no control to the counties in how money was spent.  The county proposed limiting the role of the state without being required to take over maintenance.  The idea was that the state would cede financial and planning authority for construction to the county while continuing to provide maintenance thus keeping the county "captive".  A similar strategy has been considered more recently in Virginia and South Carolina, and this common sense solution has continuously been shot down by legislatures and state DOT's absolutely and stubbornly hell-bent on devolution.  It was a sound solution that could have saved the system, but the idea slipped through the cracks.  State Senator James Lemaster was fighting on a different front pushing heavily for full local control to fix the substandard roads that were falling apart.  His strategy would ultimately prevail.  For some reason, the hybrid solution with the state providing routine maintenance only while the counties otherwise plan and construct as they choose has been nearly impossible to execute: perhaps due to unclear authority for the roads and the ease in which the state could dump that responsibility if they are only responsible for what amounts to essentially patching potholes and putting up signs.  Apparently high standards and real government efficiency absolutely constipate modern state governments who prefer chaos and passing the buck. 

So much for good ideas, of course.  Four years later, Governor Fob James expressed fiery opposition to anything but home rule for counties.  With enough support in the state senate, the counties were coerced into a compromise that resulted in the return of the captive systems to the counties.  For about a year, the state and county squabbled about how equipment, employees and facilities would be transferred and after an agreement was reached all 10 counties regained control of their roads.  Problem was that except for wealthier and more populous Baldwin County, the captive counties were mostly poor, rural counties.  This transfer of authority to the counties gave them more freedom, but it led to a definite decline in roadway standards.  These "free" counties were not able to magically provide the good roads that the local control advocates continued to champion.  In fact, road quality did not improve much at all until the late 1990's and in fact got worse.  In addition, the maintenance of traffic control devices worsened dramatically and has never returned to the levels it was when under state control.  ALDOT has also not been as consistent with signage given that they no longer have costs streamlined with more efficient processes that they did in the 70's.  Issues like this are completely ignored by home rule advocates who fail to address that most counties are structurally incapable of providing the same high standards, frequency of maintenance and uniformity from county-to-county that the state was able to provide and that the states suffer from highly fragmented road responsibility that lowers frequency and quality of maintenance on state routes.

This 2004 photo of County Road 275 in Cherokee County shows a typical rural "captive county" road.  Although this road pictured was a primary state route from 1971-1980, it was never improved from when it was a county road.  Note the terrible condition of the road, signs, lack of safety improvements and rough pavement condition long after this road was deeded to local control.  This road was not fixed until 2008.

Neglect of traffic signs remains a pretty common issue with roads in the former captive counties.  The counties have been either unwilling or unable to maintain traffic signs to the levels they were maintained under state control.  Everything was transferred to a local level whether the counties could handle it or not.  

Economies of scale and high standards are always the casualty of fragmenting road responsibility.  10 year maintenance schedules are replaced with 20 year ones.  More expensive and better materials are removed and replaced with cheaper, lower standard ones.  Professional expertise is lost and replaced with a small number of employees with little to no engineering support and very little oversight.  The roads start looking neglected, and the weeds get taller as the poorer counties are not investing in weed and brush control the way the state did.  A poorly run road agency almost never gets set straight, and this means that from county to county, maintenance is highly unreliable compared to a centralized system.  In the 1930's, it was well known that decentralized road systems were like this, but somehow that topic has disappeared from modern discourse.  Nevertheless, the return to local control did offer advantages in terms of pavement conditions especially as statewide revenues today do not keep up with demand and local governments were then free to use local sales and property taxes to pave roads, but should road quality be sacrificed for this?  Why can't we have it all?  Good standards, good roads.  Additionally, the state today provides far less to counties than it did in 1979.  In the late 70's, the state/county funding split was 45% state/55% county.  Today it is 80% state/20% county.  This change in role in terms of financing of roads is a likely reason the state abandoned its efforts, and this is also a reason that a return to full state control would not be possible nor practical if funded from a state level like it was before.  

CAPTIVE COUNTIES REVIVAL

The fatal error with captive counties was the refusal by the state to provide local financing options for road construction and maintenance improvements beyond state revenues.  If that issue had been resolved early on, quite possibly this road system could have been rescued and the home rule advocates would have not had a platform.  The view in 1955 was that counties were supposed to be relieved of all duties for roads by using only state forces and revenues, but that strategy failed as the state was steering funds away from captive county governments for other reasons coupled with a sharp decline in the state's spending power within that same time period.  The idea was that property taxes would no longer have to be used for roads in the initial North Carolina strategy, but the inadequate nature of state revenues proved that unless state taxes were raised very high that it is not possible for the state to adequately maintain county roads without significant local financing.  

Nevertheless, the fight was not over.  Many in the state legislature were fans of the captive system and thought it should be brought back for all but the most populous counties.  Despite the devolution tide of the 1970's, a very serious proposal was put forward in 1985 to take over all county roads in all counties except those with a population of over 100,000 residents.  That bill had mixed reviews, but it primarily had some pretty strong opposition from counties that had never before been captive.  The main opposition was that commissioners in the formerly "free" counties felt that the state had not done a good job in the captive counties nor were they doing a good job maintaining the state routes.  They did not trust the state and felt that their roads were in better shape than what the state could provide.  In truth, these county commissioners were both right and wrong at the same time.  This brings us to the issue of roads today in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina but for the purpose of this post we will focus on Virginia.

VIRGINIA'S 93 CAPTIVE COUNTIES: A SIMILAR STORY WITH AN OUTCOME THAT COULD BE JUST AS DISASTROUS

Virginia's road system today has a lot in common with the captive counties in Alabama.  The state's secondary state highway system does not define its counties as "captive", however, since the vast majority of roads of this class are under state control.  However, the distinction is the same.  While the "captive" counties include all but two counties, these two free counties have a known financial advantage from the state in terms of funding per mile and access to local financing.  This is not lost on the other counties, especially the more populous ones, who basically have their hands tied and are unable to raise enough local revenues to make up for what the state is not providing.  It is truly depressing to cross from a secondary road onto a Henrico County road and see a narrow, pothole-filled chip sealed road widen into a smooth asphalt road with wide lanes.  Of course, what isn't considered by the home rule champions is the fact that both of these counties do not share any revenues with municipalities, have a massive sales and property tax base, and have much greater populations than these other counties.  Instead of forcing counties to take over the roads, why aren't they allowing every county to raise local funds to repair and construct roads that are then handed over to the state to maintain?  While some regional sales tax reforms have been created helping greatly, it is still insufficient to address the huge backlog of work that is needed.  Although the gas tax was raised, it is going to take a lot more to get the roads right.

In Virginia, the state has not kept up with modern traffic demands.  Until 1986, counties were forbidden from investing any resources into new road construction relying entirely on the state.  This put fast growing counties at a severe disadvantage by not allowing them to fund new road construction when state revenues were not sufficiently addressing substandard road conditions.  While counties across the state have been allowed more flexibility in terms of funding road improvements above what the state has offered, what the state has not provided is a dedicated and plentiful funding source for counties to use independent of the state.  The result has been a very low local investment in roadway projects while the state has done little to nothing to improve the secondary state roads.  Secondary state roads are still "local" roads.  If the counties wish to improve the roads beyond what the state provides, they should have a means of raising money to do so since they actually use these roads and thus directly experience hazardous conditions.  

Things came to a head in 2011 when the state of the secondary roads got so bad that the number of miles in poor condition jumped to around 50%.  This was a direct result of the state's low gas tax that was not adjusted for inflation and had not been raised since 1986.  State revenues continued to decline resulting in the continued deferment of maintenance, and most of this deferment was on the state's secondary system.  State funding for secondary roads fell to zero in 2012, and the former governor Bob McDonnell enthusiastically proposed a transfer of both construction and maintenance of all secondary state roads to the county governments.  His proposal was hotly contested leading to a compromise that ultimately led to an increase in taxes through wholesale gas taxes (replacing the excise gas tax), regional sales taxes and an increase in fees.  The result of this compromise was that the state's secondary system was at least temporarily rescued from devolution, but this road plan is still a band-aid that is not healing the problem, and ultimately gas taxes and other fees still had to be raised.  State funding is still not adequate to cover all local needs, and home rule advocates are still waiting like for the opportunity or a vocal political advocate to obtain a wide enough support to overthrow the centralized road system and replace it with 93 different road departments, mostly with shoddy standards.

Roads like this one in Loudoun County, VA need a lot of work.  While this road is functionally local, the fact is that the state is not providing enough funding to repave, repair or rebuild roads like this.  While the county should not be expected to take over maintenance of roads like this, local revenue sources should be expanded to assure that local matters are properly addressed.  However, Loudoun has proved capable of providing funds for construction that have made it possible to fix roads like this one (it was paved and realigned recently).  This does not mean, however, that Loudoun is capable of caring for those roads on a routine basis the way that VDOT does presently.

These two roads in unincorporated Falls Church are under state control, and they show how serious the backlog of maintenance became prior to the 2012 legislation.  The first road has since been repaired, but the second is still awaiting funding for repairs.  While the state is slowly catching up from zeroing out secondary road funds in 2012, it is not likely that roads in this condition will continue to be tolerated by county and state residents if funding does not remain adequate for maintenance.  The first is Wilson Blvd (Rt. 613) and the second is Peyton Randolph Drive (Rt. 2325).  While Wilson Blvd. was finally resurfaced early in 2015, this image demonstrates the difficulties that state politics can have on road funding.  Similar roads in nearby Arlington County where the state does not control county road maintenance are in better condition, but quite a few roads in Arlington are still in rough shape.  While having Fairfax County take over road maintenance is not being advocated here, the county having its own funding sources to repair roads like this when state revenues fall short are definitely necessary as a means of continuing a centralized road maintenance strategy.

The question was again placed on the ballot in the governor's race in 2013.  Ken Cuccinelli's platform was to turn all secondary state roads to the counties.  Terry McAuliffe's was to keep the road system as it is with more funding.  The very close race resulted in the anti-devolution candidate winning the election, and he has recently pushed for a further gas tax increase.  However, Virginia's governors only serve one term.  The next election could easily result in a political conservative similar to Cuccinelli succeeding and thus again pursuing devolution.  If Virginia is going to pursue devolution, the Commonwealth should consider a better strategy than his full-scale graduated transfer plan.  Several options are discussed in the proposals section of this blog.

 

A NOVEL OPTION FOR VIRGINIA COUNTIES TO RESCUE THE SECONDARY SYSTEM

 

Devolution doesn't have to be to the counties.  It can just be transferred to another large highway agency.  Let's say that in this next election that Youngkin becomes governor and devolution is something he is hell-bent on.  The counties don't have to take it.  They have an option before it's too late, and that is a counter-proposal to create a statewide cooperative that essentially "receives" the secondary roads.  Call it the "Virginia Local Roads Commission" or "Virginia Regional DOT".  Unlike the secondary system, this will be a statewide DOT owned collectively by all of the counties and will work on their behalf to oversee all construction and maintenance essentially keeping the secondary roads and not forcing counties to take on engineering and maintenance individually.  This can even be managed privately in lieu of setting up a statewide office for it like VDOT.  It can be a win-win that will set a precedent.  The cooperative, if broadly participated enough, could be drilled down into four units: a rural statewide one and one for Greater Richmond, Hampton Roads, and Northern Virginia as long as the population of each exceeds 1 million residents.  This fits into the regional roads plan in that the roads of regional importance vs. statewide importance are still centralized, but they are funded and managed separate from the primary route system.

WHY VIRGINIA'S STATE CONTROLLED SECONDARY STATE SYSTEM WILL FAIL IF IT IS NOT REFORMED

It is important to consider that Alabama's failed "captive county" program provides some lessons for Virginia. The lessons learned from Alabama's "captive counties" included the following:

• The state does some things better than counties and counties do some things better than the state
• State control of county roads does lead to better routine maintenance standards than what counties are able to provide, because:
• It is engineer-driven with engineers always making road decisions
• It has clearly written standards that must be followed
• Has a stronger organizational structure that better enforces standards
• Has high economies of scale and purchasing power allowing more expensive materials to be purchased in bulk and at lower unit cost
• However, states do not have the revenues or organization to properly fund road construction off of the federal-aid road network resulting in a construction backlog
• Significant local funding matches are essential to fund proper maintenance of roads off of the federal-aid eligible road network, and local funding matches are weak to non-existent in most counties
  
• State revenues alone are not enough to keep up with needed local road improvements resulting in deferment of paving and other road projects 
• Local governments need a guaranteed source of revenues to fund road construction, and those funds must be used only for transportation purposes on secondary state roads
• When local governments can chip away at the construction backlog and speed up completion of maintenance projects, state revenues will then be adequate for routine maintenance and maintenance costs will be manageable with less reactive and more proactive work
• Deferred maintenance has a snowball effect due to the much higher cost to replace failed roads
• A perception exists that the state is using state-controlled county roads as an ATM by diverting maintenance funds to pay for larger road projects due to a lack of transparency on how funding is spent
• The truth is that the state revenues are inadequate to maintain such a large system without a local funding source, and the result has been an extremely high amount of narrow, cheaply paved roadways that are hazardous for all types of vehicles
  
• Like Alabama, Virginia has given "free" counties an unfair advantage in state payments.  Captive Counties in Alabama were also shortchanged
• Payments to free counties should be modified with the condition that the counties provide routine maintenance of state-owned roads within those counties (excluding traffic control)
• Replacing local control with a regional system as a steward working on behalf of all counties would resolve this imbalance while preventing the 95 counties, 95 different standards problem
  
• Full state ownership of county roads potentially reduces the funding available for improvements on the primary state highway system unless state revenues are kept at a very high level meaning higher state taxes
• State DOT's use this as a justification for devolution in that they believe state-aid road funds should be primarily for roads of greatest statewide importance
• However, primary routes are still adequately funded in the consolidated system
• If state agencies feel this is the case, then the state should employ one of two options:
• The first is to steer secondary funds uniformly to all county agencies with the intention that the counties that want to remain under state control have the state retain that funding as an "operations fee" with the local governments given a receipt each year showing how that funding was spent
• The second is for the state to steer all engineering and maintenance responsibility to a separate statewide cooperative agency working on behalf of the counties and let each member county decide how to finance operations and maintenance
  
• This approach balances out the "unfair advantage" in the "free" counties
• Critics say state government is not accountable to county voters thus is more likely to ignore needs of a local nature
• States have actually been very good stewards to counties in a centralized system, and they have done as good as they can with limited funding creating a very high level of efficiency, but with inadequate funding they are unable to modernize the roads or resurface roads frequently enough
• Giving local governments extra funding options through local option sales taxes, local option gas taxes, impact fees and/or ad valorem fees that can only be spent on transportation are necessary to provide local governments a way to fund construction and speed up maintenance projects regardless of whether the state remains in charge of local roads
• This way the state is a partner to local governments instead of a large, remote agency sending state money elsewhere
• Giving local governments funding options is NOT intended to be a devolution strategy.  It means that the local government finances improvements that are returned to to the state DOT upon completion for maintenance

These lessons are on display today as Virginia's approach to state control has led to not only substandard pavement conditions but also substandard roadway construction.  Roadways across the state are very outdated in design with narrow lanes, little to no shoulders, poor geometry, unsafe bridges, flooding problems and poor drainage.  Many of these roads were paved in the 1940's and 50's and have recurring maintenance problems requiring far more frequent resurfacing to keep in good condition.  In urban areas, the state has not provided badly needed intersection improvements, traffic lights/traffic circles, lane widening, sidewalks or other needed upgrades to provide safe and well-designed roads that match the heavy traffic volumes.  These are typically needs more likely to be championed by the local government, and local governments already spend as much as they are capable on secondary road construction projects.  However, the states are generally unwilling to raise the gas tax statewide.  Some options Virginia could choose from to give counties leverage over construction include:

1. 3-5 cent local option gas tax increase
2. 1/2 to 1 cent sales tax
3. Impact fees on new construction (only useful in high growth counties)
4. Ad valorem taxes (not to be confused with vehicle property taxes)

State control of everything from interstates to cul-de-sacs is a problem, because it is essentially a commingling of funding for both highways and local roads with very different priorities.  The way around this is the partnership model whether it is:

• The state continues to manage county roads, but local funding is provided and employed to complete what the state is unable to fund directly essentially expanding what already exists in a handful of counties in the state
  
• County roads are managed statewide through a cooperative "regional" system, but separate and independent from VDOT turning "secondary roads" into "regional roads" where engineering and oversight never actually does transfer to the local level even if primary financial responsibility does
  

Otherwise, funding for statewide needs will always compete with local needs with too little done to mitigate safety problems, maintenance problems and traffic bottlenecks on local-level roads.  Overall, the possibility of any significant state investment in operational improvements on secondary roads is quite low while the counties by and large are not able to steer enough of their own resources to begin the long and expensive work required to bring these roads to modern standards.  In fact, the majority of road work funded by the counties comes in the form of new construction.  A hybrid approach is the solution for that.

Local Examples of the State-Local Hybrid Approach

With these options, the county would have substantial funding to construct and maintain roads, BUT that does not mean that they take over maintenance.  Consider if Fairfax County, VA used a 1/2 cent sales tax to fund widenings and roadway reconstruction, and raised a 3 cent gas tax to fund the operations fee to pay back to VDOT for maintenance.  This way, the county actually is "maintaining" the roads, but they continue to trust the expertise of VDOT for routine maintenance while enjoying the economies of scale available from using a cooperative approach with the state.  VDOT would still budget the same amount as they did to Fairfax County, but the county would fill in the gaps.  In essense, the state did raise more money, but they entrusted it on a local level with it transferred back to the state based on the needs of the county.

Consider Loudoun County, VA.  How is Loudoun different?  For one, they are heavily involved in construction and often use impact fees as concessions from developers to pay for significant road projects and other infrastructure upgrades.  Thus, the county has successfully kept up with growth demands in places of heavy new construction as historic trails have to be quickly realigned to accommodate suburban sprawl.  The problem is, most of the functionally local roads that the county is not fixing are still in very poor condition.  Loudoun clearly needs more money as they are faced with the need to rapidly pave hundreds of miles of gravel roads, reconstruct others and modernize the county to meet growth demands.

Roads such as this in Loudoun County were only recently paved, but state funding was inadequate for this project.  It was paid for mostly by county funds then left to VDOT for maintenance.  It is considered a "rural rustic road" thus the narrow lanes and hilly geometry.  The county has routinely had to pave to this lower standard due to lack of funds to properly reconstruct roads.

Images such as this scene in Loudoun County highlight the depth of the construction backlog.  The county still has a large number of gravel roads, single-lane low-water bridges and roads with poor geometry that need to be completely realigned, widened and rebuilt.  You can see the state did a good job of warning of the hazards this bridge presents, but when it comes to construction this and many other counties in Virginia need better access to local financing to modernize potentially deadly roads such as this one.

While the county still enjoys and has no interest in ending their partnership with VDOT for maintenance of local roads, the county clearly needs additional local funding sources to modernize roads that cannot be improved with impact fees.  What if they could raise a local sales tax?  The county has substantial retail including a popular outlet mall.  If Loudoun was able to speed up improvements and catch up with the state's massive backlog, maybe VDOT would have an easier time maintaining what is already there.  VDOT is clearly capable of providing the basic outfit (resurfacing of major secondary roads, traffic control maintenance and summer/winter maintenance), but they are not fixing many roadways that remain in poor condition, paving new dirt roads or reconstruct shoddy-built roads.  It is the county that is mostly doing this.  If the county was able to get the county's roads up to state standards, pave every dirt road and rebuild every road in poor condition maybe then VDOT's available funds would be sufficient to maintain Loudoun's complicated road system. 

HOW TO REFORM VIRGINIA'S ROAD SYSTEM: DEVOLUTION ALTERNATIVES

Nobody involved with roads in Virginia denies that the future of state control looks sketchy for the state's secondary highway system.  Obviously the 2013 compromise provided flexibility to the counties and improved state funding, but VDOT was already so far behind from years of deferred maintenance and construction that more is needed to catch up.  Cheaply built roads with poor drainage cost more to maintain, and a vast program is needed to not just better maintain the roads that are there, but also to do more to modernize roads in the more populous counties.

Secondary route reconstruction such as Rt. 603 (North Fork Rd) in Montgomery County to modern highway standards as well as improvements to non-federal-aid secondaries is needed at much higher levels than is presently occurring across the state.  This cannot be done unless a new local funding source is identified.

The vast sum of winding and extremely narrow roads is not just limited to rural counties.  Counties around Richmond, Northern Virginia and Charlottesville that have a much larger population also are full of these substandard roads, and these roads do have traffic volumes that justify reconstruction.  Counties such as Stafford have been using their own available funds to begin reconstructing secondary roads, but what they have been able to accomplish is still a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.  Traffic volumes on major roads are worsened when the secondary options discourage through traffic.  Improvements to these roads are vital for safety and economic progress.  Voters and legislators are not likely to continue to tolerate roads with terrible pavement, poor sight distance and inadequate design for decades to come.  In fact, it seems that the only roads that the state does an acceptable job maintaining are the federal-aid collectors and arterials both primary and secondary.  However, turning roads to the county is a proposition likely to result in a sharp decline in engineering and traffic control standards in most counties across the state.  Much of Virginia remains rural and will not have the resources to maintain their own roads to state standards regardless of available funding.  In addition, urban counties are not always reliable in funding and maintenance of roads as is evidenced in Montgomery County, MD.  

The solution lies in an approach where the state's role is diminished but not eliminated.  What went wrong in Alabama was that the state's role was completely eliminated.  Instead of adopting Lauderdale County's plan of keeping the state for routine maintenance only, the state completely exited the county road business.  The 1985 state takeover plan also did not include a provision to limit the state's powers, thus why it failed.  The key word is control.  The state's control structure will only work if local governments have broader funding and powers in road construction and maintenance on secondary state roads.  This means that the strategy must change.  However, a strategy of cooperative services with the state handling technical services and routine maintenance on account of the local governments should never change.

Another post details the devolution alternatives for both Virginia and West Virginia with specific details.  It lays out the specific strategies that should be adopted

ROAD PLANS ON THIS SITE THAT ADDRESS THIS ISSUE IN VIRGINIA

The most ideal solution is to keep VDOT in control of the roads they have controlled since 1932, but to allow local governments the ability to raise their own gas or sales taxes to speed up maintenance projects and finance far more road projects than the state can presently afford.  It is clear that not only is much more needed with reconstructing roads, but also to create roads that are safer for both motorists and pedestrians.  Primitive, narrow and winding roads with heavy traffic are a hazard for everyone that uses them, and local governments should not have to beg for help when the state has so many conflicting priorities.  Give the local governments the option to fund more road projects, but do not punish them for doing so by forcing them to take over road maintenance.  If this is still not possible, then perhaps in more populous regions of the state it might be time to consider developing a regional road system like the ones proposed in the Regional Roads Plan.  Some other ideas that might also help to fix this imbalance are as follows:

• Traffic Control Cooperative Plan
• Loudoun County certainly demonstrates that the state does some things better than the counties and the counties do some things better than the state.
• Nowhere is this more true than with traffic operations
• Local governments as a whole are not financially nor structurally suited to handle this technical operation that is too expensive to correctly administer without high standards, without high economies of scale and without a specialized agency that has a PTOE supervising engineer
• Even if a county otherwise does an excellent job maintaining roads, they typically do a terrible job with traffic control
• This is why even if road maintenance otherwise is transferred to a local level, this specific state function should remain under state control or transferred to a cooperative with state funding.
• Statewide Contracting Plan
• If VDOT exits the county road business, this responsibility should not fall directly on the county governments
• Instead, interested counties and municipalities broker a deal to either allow secondary roads to transfer into a new state agency or to form their own interagency cooperative that handles secondary roads keeping VDOT as a contractor while the organization is being formed.
• The state could also step in and address the concerns of local agencies by developing a separate state agency to handle local roads or a joint cooperative among all interested partners needs to replace this that would keep roads consolidated, but separate them from VDOT
• The cooperative could co-locate facilities with VDOT, share equipment and operate as a statewide unit that just happens to be under the authority of the 93 counties formerly under state control.
• The idea is that if counties must take over roads that they will NOT be required to set up separate road systems in each county.
• This plan creates a balance and a safety net if the state forces the hand of the 93 counties across the state who have enjoyed relief from the higher costs associated with full local control
• Farm-To-Market Cooperative Highway System Plan
• This approach reduces, but does not eliminate VDOT's role of maintaining secondary roads
• VDOT keeps partial control of the secondary state highway system with state control reduced to around 35-45% of the road network
• Construction costs are passed on to counties and municipalities for all other roads
• All counties can either retain VDOT as a contractor at their own expense for remaining roads or form a regional/statewide cooperative that ultimately assumes maintenance responsibility for both local and farm-to-market roads
• Two-Way Consolidated Road Maintenance Plan
• A major goal in Virginia should be to keep the historic consolidated road system consolidated, but with reforms to provide a degree of local control that has not previously been available
• If all secondary roads are transferred to county authority for construction, that doesn't mean that the county and state should operate separately
• Obviously two counties both construct and maintain their own road systems and others may soon join them such as Chesterfield County
• If that's the case, then the counties should be given the same responsibility as cities: maintenance of state-owned roads
• Perhaps this arrangement could be set up like the Local Exchange Plan with the state providing traffic operations work on local roads in turn for the county providing all other routine maintenance on state-owned roads even if it is not a match dollar for dollar
• In this plan, either the county works for the state or the state works for the county.
• Populous counties would benefit consolidated local maintenance of county and state routes while less populous counties could retain VDOT as the exclusive steward of both state and local roads

SUPERVISION OF STATE AND LOCAL ROADS NEEDS TO BE RESTRUCTURED INTO A CO-OP MODEL

The idea that either a state or local government agency should have total control of their own systems without any overlapping of duties or sharing of services is an antiquated and inefficient concept.  Most states today are too large to handle all local matters while most counties and municipalities are too small to handle matters that the state handles best.  This is why the captive county system failed in Alabama and why Virginia's secondary state highway system is also in danger of failing.  Local control is not a bad thing as long as it is understood that local governments cannot handle everything on their own.  The whole idea of local control is to make sure that local funding stays at home and that how that money is spent is accountable to local voters.  However, this does not mean that local government is either responsible or efficient to the degree that it actually works that way in every case.  As was said before, we need to think regionally, not locally.   Thinking regionally means that the gray area is explored as a solution either with an overlapping service structure between the states and local governments or the development of a regional governance model for transportation that places significant road responsibility on a level above the county or municipality but below the state: in other words, a state within a state.

In all, the lessons learned from Alabama demonstrate that balance is needed.  Balance did not exist when the Alabama Highway Department (now ALDOT) managed the captive county roads, and balance does not exist today with the counties maintaining those same roads the state handled back then.  Local agencies need to understand that opposing a transfer to the local level will not be enough to stop it from happening.  Instead of ignoring the problem or turning back to the bad old days, local agencies are provided here with tools that give them the power to stop devolution by thinking outside the box for new funding allocation methods, new organization structures and elimination of the belief that local control on a county of municipal level is the solution to a construction and maintenance backlog.  Other local agencies in decentralized states also need to understand that they can enact centralization by adopting a similar strategy to what is described above.  While it is generally the duty of a state to delegate responsibilities to local governments, time and history have proven that not all local agencies are the same and that what is best for some may not work as well for others.  Roads should not be fully centralized nor should they be completely local.  Both agencies need each other's help, and the best way to do this is to allocate the responsibility in a way that is the most beneficial for all parties.  

Regional Roads: Examples of Potential Regional Roads Concepts (Part 3)

Four examples here can demonstrate how regionalization could help solve complex transportation issues that have not been easily resolved by other means.  Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and Metro Atlanta all have been competing heavily for transportation funds with their surrounding states while the fragmentation of government in the region has made it very difficult to adequately raise revenues for region-specific projects as well as not providing an adequately maintained road system due to widely varying priorities and poor economies of scale.  A similar problem exists with township roads in New England, which is also discussed here.  While New England lacks as much in the way of regional competition, what they do have is the severe fragmentation that lowers the standards and raises costs for residents of those states.  These systems need to be unified, but in no case has the state been a good partner to these areas.  Here I will describe each possible regional scenario:

NORTHERN VIRGINIA

Northern Virginia is one of the fastest growing and most populous portions of Virginia.  With a collective population of around 2,000,000 it shares an equivalent population to the entire state of West Virginia.  The region has also suffered from working with a state who assumed control of county roads in all but one county over 80 years ago.  When the Byrd Road Act took responsibility for county roads in Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William Counties, all were very rural areas with few paved roads and little need for local control.  Since then the roads have not kept up with traffic demands with rough pavement, lack of intersection upgrades and substandard roadway designs choking traffic throughout the entire region.  Northern Virginia desperately needs to invest in a modernization of the road system, but local governments have a disincentive to invest heavily in the roads when the funding can be transferred elsewhere in the state and funding is held by the state capitol instead of within the region.  In addition, local option funding has been severely limited by the state government.  What works for rural Virginia is not working so well for this area.

However, legislation passed in 2012 already has developed a framework to give Northern Virginia more autonomy for road improvements through the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.  This agency has its own taxing powers and plans road and transit improvements specifically for the region.  In all, it appears to be a big step in the direction of regional control of roads, but at present the region has otherwise maintained their current structure of state control of roads in all but Arlington County and local control of municipal streets in all but Clifton.  Nonetheless, in the past 15 years the push for local control has popped up periodically: especially with Fairfax County.  Fairfax County carries the largest percentage of the population with over 1,000,000 residents.  Such a county is financially capable of maintaining their own road system, but the issues stretch beyond Fairfax County including several independent cities.  Arlington County also has more financial flexibility due to never giving their roads to VDOT.  While county-owned roads would probably work, it would be better if the entire region functioned as a single unit keeping the same road structure that VDOT has currently but operating it out of Northern Virginia exclusively instead of Richmond.  Because independent cities exist in this region, they would either have to be opted out or the "engineering district" model would have to be adapted basically centralizing engineering among the various road agencies along with shared traffic control.  It should also be noted that Northern Virginia's regional transportation authority matches the boundaries of the regional planning commission.

Northern Virginia, however, works largely as a unit on many things.  They also share in the cost of the transit systems and even park systems.  Northern Virginia is also in a unique position in that it does NOT have existing county road networks except in Arlington County.  This means that a transfer of state authority to a regional authority would be a far simpler process than in other states.  Instead of combining different employees and approaches, they would roll over the existing VDOT regional offices into a Northern Virginia DOT thus instantly gaining power as a state within a state.  Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington Counties could collectively control the regions roads instead of each county separately allowing them to pool resources and define projects independent of the state.  Instead of primary and secondary state roads all owned and maintained by VDOT, primary roads would be owned by the state and maintained by the region and secondary roads would become regional roads owned and maintained solely by the regional DOT.

It should be noted, however, that the Byrd Road Act has a flaw in that it did not include cities in the plan.  While some towns in the region already have their roads contracted to VDOT, cities in the region are in a reverse position.  The cities of Alexandria, Manassas, Manassas Park and Fairfax are all required to not only maintain their own roads but also the non-expressway state roads within their cities.  Manassas Park in particular has suffered from a lack of adequate funding and maintenance problems due to not being able to combine forces with anyone for roads as well as being required to maintain primary routes.  With a new regional DOT, the rules need to be changed allowing all cities and towns to give part or all road maintenance to the regional system regardless of population.  This rule change is also needed for the next area of interest.

HAMPTON ROADS

Hampton Roads is probably one of the most unique transportation regions in the country.  This is because Virginia's requirement that cities are independent of counties has led to the disappearance of counties around Hampton Roads resulting in a solid cluster of independent cities instead of one larger city.  Because VDOT is not allowing non-expressway state roads in the region to be maintained by VDOT, this means that each city is responsible for most every road in the region including some expressways.  However, each city also works independently of each other with widely varying road standards that in most cases are all below VDOT specifications specifically in the area of safety improvements.  Four counties (Gloucester, York, James City and Isle of Wight) also exist in the region, and of those one of those was in talks to take over their county roads due to their proximity to the nine cities that make up Hampton Roads bringing the population total to 1.7 million.  James City County has also recently been in discussions with VDOT to take back their county road system.

Clearly the roadway situation in Hampton Roads is dysfunctional and it sets a bad precedent for the rest of the state.  The independent city structure should not prevent cities from seeking a means of providing a regional road delivery structure.  Like Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads also has a regional transportation planning organization.  The entire planning commission area also covers two more counties: Southampton and Surry.  Since each city and county is already consolidated, it once again makes sense to create a unified road structure that includes the entire region.  Because of the highly urbanized population and higher level of local control, however, it might also make sense to place a regional agency in charge of major roads in lieu of every cul-de-sac like VDOT does.  Essentially the existing regional transportation planning organization would create a DOT to take over all expressways, collector and arterial roadways in the cities from both VDOT and the cities respectively.  In the five counties in the region, the regional DOT would also assume control of all remaining secondary roads from VDOT in the six counties of the region similar to what is proposed for Northern Virginia.  However, all of these counties should also be given the option to stay with VDOT if they choose considering that the region will still have adequate population even without them.  In the independent cities, the roads would be divided into three tiers: primary (maintained by the region), regional (main roads owned and maintained by the region) and city (other streets).  Traffic control should be handled by the regional cooperative on all roads in the region even if certain streets are otherwise maintained by the cities.

If both Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia broke away from VDOT to form their own "state within a state" regional DOT's it would help correct the power struggle between these regions and Richmond.  With separate DOT's formed, the state's road budget could then be cleanly divided with a guaranteed ratio going to Northern Virginia, a guaranteed ratio going to Hampton Roads and the rest of the state no longer competing with these regions for funds.  With a regional structure, the two separate regions could also raise revenues on their own without involving VDOT.  It would also help VDOT to preserve the Byrd Road Act since the rest of the state is primarily rural and functions better with the current system.  However, that does not mean that a successful regionalization of Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia could not also be applied in the rest of the state based on the population thresholds described in this proposal.  In fact, all other secondary roads in Virginia could either be divided up into planning districts or divorced from VDOT into a Virginia Rural Roads Commission that maintains secondary roads jointly across all of rural Virginia.

METRO ATLANTA

The original 10-county Atlanta Metropolitan Area is highlighted in blue.  Today that covers 30+ counties.

The story with Metro Atlanta in some ways parallels Northern Virginia, but is actually quite different.  Georgia, unlike Virginia, has not embraced collective maintenance of roads either regionally or through the state.  Georgia also does not have independent cities, so every city is part of a county and has to share revenues with the county they are in.  The state actually relies strongly on local governments to plan, construct and maintain roads with limited state funding or involvement.  Metro Atlanta is also very fragmented with Fulton County in particular now largely completely divided into municipalities that resemble townships.  Dekalb and Gwinnett Counties seem to be following a similar course with new cities replacing large swaths of unincorporated suburban towns.  With relatively high populations, the seizure of local control from high population counties makes sense, but in terms of transportation policy is neither cost-efficient nor beneficial.  Road connectivity remains poor across Metro Atlanta and roadway standards vary widely from county to county and city to city.  The state road network is also simply too small with antiquated highway routings only causing confusion and thus worsening congestion in the region.  The state road network as it stands also does not provide any real benefit to the traveling public outside of the interstates since most surface state routes are not as well-maintained as in other parts of the state.  GDOT also remains firm in not taking over any new roads despite the explosion of roadway and lane miles throughout the region.  Cobb County in particular has the lowest ratio of state control of any county in the state with only 4% under state control when the state average is 15%.  However, the City of Atlanta has an unusually high ratio of state controlled roads likely due to the inability to fund these roads adequately on their own.  Nonetheless, this high level of state responsibility in city of Atlanta offers no benefit since the state does not do a good job maintaining these minor surface state roads while the city is adequately equipped to handle that responsibility.

Once again, a regional plan should be considered here.  The state of Georgia just recently surpassed the 10,000,000 mark on population.  Of that population, 40% or 4,000,000 reside within just the 10 county territory represented by the Atlanta Regional Commission forming the original boundaries of Metro Atlanta.  In the wider metro area, the population climbs to 5.7 million or 57% of the state's population!  The region alone has a population slightly larger than Maryland.  This means that the Atlanta Regional Commission could successfully operate their own regional DOT completely separate from GDOT with more than adequate funding to do so.  Adding Polk County, which itself is a micropolitan statistical area, brings the population to 5.8 million.  For sure it is an excellent place to start in the development of a regional highway system.  Of the larger metro area, 12 counties have populations under 50,000 residents meaning that they would greatly benefit from the centralization of the region's road system to a Greater Atlanta system.  These 12 counties would ultimately turn all routine maintenance over to the region saving those taxpayers money and improving the standards in those rural counties.  The larger counties, by comparison, would be able to do more with less by transferring the major highways in the region to the region itself.  If nothing else, developing a regional road system in all of Metro Atlanta could help spearhead these outlying counties to break away and form regional partnerships with other rural counties in their respective planning regions.  In fact, four separate planning regions make up 20 of the 30 counties in Greater Metro Atlanta, and if those broke away into their proper planning regions they would instantly have populations sufficient to begin recruiting other counties in their regions to join them.  As a result, one regional DOT would ultimately evolve into five regions and would hopefully spearhead further development of the other seven south of Atlanta.

By creating a regional DOT for Metro Atlanta, the region could right-size the road system in relation to the rest of the state.  While the four core metro counties are theoretically more than capable of taking care of their own roads, the reality of the incorporation of those counties coupled with the higher costs to maintain these road networks separately is not really working as well as it would appear.  The regional system would help create greater efficiency through direct responsibility of at least 25%-30% of the road system and an additional limited responsibility for the 12 smaller counties.  This would also help Cobb, Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb, all counties with very large road systems, to focus more on the construction and maintenance of truly local roads while some of the municipalities in the region that are too small to adequately manage road networks on their own such as Chattahoochee Hills, Hapeville and Mountain Park would have the option to use regional forces entirely when state forces never previously were available to them.

CONNECTICUT

New England is a complicated situation.  Taxes are high and roads are rough in a region of the country familiar with harsh winters and a form of government not embraced by much of the country: townships.  Nowhere in the country do townships have more power than New England where counties have essentially been deactivated.  In fact, no piece of property is not part of a small municipality in New England.  While the town form of government, a relic of Colonial times, has been helpful at keeping government close to the people it has resulted in ridiculously low road standards and higher costs throughout New England due to the very highly fragmented nature of townships.

Regionalization in New England is something that does not have to be as complicated as in parts of the South and Midwest.  In many cases just placing main roads under the authority of the county would greatly improve the quality of roads in the region while allowing New England states to downsize their typically larger state route systems.  While Maine is not a really good case for this plan due to its low population and high ratio of state control, states like New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island should truly pursue the creation of either county road systems simply for the purpose of bringing more roadways up to proper specifications or create road districts based on regional planning districts or county lines.

However, the specific example being used here is Connecticut.  With only 8 counties the state could run a very efficient road operation if municipalities were laid out like most states and counties were fully functional.  Regardless, Connecticut splits the pie very thin among 164 different townships.  In no way is it cost efficient or financially viable for 164 different townships to have their very own street department doing exactly the same job on just a few roads that the next township over also does.  This makes costs very high for local government as a whole and not just for roads, and very few of these municipalities could afford to have anything remotely like a traffic operations unit to manage traffic control.  The lack of any state involvement in the maintenance of township roads also does not help.  Since these are municipalities, it is also typically more difficult for a state to have any authority compared to a county.  Compare this to Maryland where most counties have similar populations to Connecticut.  Maryland's county roads are typically far better maintained simply due to maintaining a county structure for road maintenance despite a very high population.  A typical Maryland county has a population of over 100,000 residents with few municipalities.  Thus, counties in Maryland operate at a far higher level due to the lack of incorporated municipalities carving up the funding pie.

This map of Connecticut shows how using counties instead of townships as a form of "regionalization" for road maintenance could be far more efficient and produce a far better road system.  Nearly every county in Connecticut has at least 150,000 residents meaning eight very well-maintained county road systems instead of 164 poorly maintained township road systems.  (Sourced from ct.gov)

In terms of creating an MSA-based district, the township system may actually be advantageous since it is far easier to carve up districts accurately.  In addition, if every regional road district in Connecticut, for instance, was divided based on 400,000 residents, 9 regional districts could be formed very close to the current number of counties.  Since every county in Connecticut is well over 100,000 residents per county, this means that the regional organizations would simply relieve both the state and the towns of the main roadways.  This would mean that Connecticut could cut their current state-owned ratio in half to about 9% and transfer the remaining connecting roads for a combined total of about 30-40% of the road system.  Low population towns could also simply pay the regional agency to maintain their remaining roads for them meaning huge costs savings for the residents of those towns and a lower tax burden across the state.  This would also free up far more funding for better roadway safety standards and smoother roads.

GEORGIA

NOTE: The map/information below will soon be updated to reflect boundaries based on regional planning commissions (2/17/17)

With the Metro Atlanta map, it is important to also show the whole state including the proposed 28 county region.  Georgia proves that the county model is an unreliable means of giving the best results especially when the population is spread too thin.  With 159 counties, only Texas has more counties but even Texas's counties are much larger than Georgia's micro-counties.  While Georgia avoided the township system, Georgia has not only too many counties but also far too many municipalities carving up the pie.  While the idea for regional roads was born out of a solution for Northern Virginia, it appears it could very well solve the county problem without eliminating a single county in Georgia.

This crudely color-coded map is of the existing planning regions, but is designed to also eventually define the regions of regional road cooperative districts.  Note the total of 12 regions.  Also note Region 9.  Region 9 is barely above the 300,000 threshold and may have to be combined with Region 8 if population of the region drops below that threshold.  All of the other regions have a population of 350,000 or more.  

The average population of all of the regions shown here is 800,000.  This means that there are approximately 12 "states within a state" to work with here in terms of ability to provide state-level transportation standards and maintenance.  However, unless a dedicated statewide funding source is able to supply the lower population regions, it may be necessary to combine Regions 8 and 9 if population of either drops below the 300,000 threshold.  Nonetheless, this is a vast improvement over the current structure.  Region 9 in particular has a population in many counties of only 3,000 in population yet they currently provide all of their own road maintenance.  Note as well how this plan ties the rural counties to population centers in the region allowing improved economies of scale and higher standards in the more populous counties while giving the low population areas access to professional standards and higher purchasing power enjoyed by the more populous counties.

CONCLUSION

Regional road concepts are a means of completely rethinking the role of both states and local governments in terms of road planning, construction and maintenance.  With so many types of regional organizations in place, it is a wonder why the actual process of building and maintaining roads continues to fall largely on very small local jurisdictions across much of the country.  With higher overhead costs and lower overall consistency still an issue today, most counties and municipalities need a better alternative now as much as they did 80 years ago.  However, states are proving to no longer be the best option to address this issue.  Various financial crises are wrecking both centralized road programs in the Mid-Atlantic states and other less centralized road programs across much of the country.  Even the less centralized systems are struggling to finance larger road systems spread across numerous jurisdictions that have all grown larger and more expensive than available funding.  Clearly both structures have outlived their usefulness.

States have also proved that they want to reduce responsibility while counties and cities have shown that it costs more than taxpayers are willing or able to pay to provide a high quality road network.  Since counties and cities have shown an unwillingness to consolidate, and secession of portions of states from larger states for that purpose is unrealistic, the only other solution is to create a means of providing road construction and maintenance on a regional level without actually creating any new jurisdictions.  This is why the regional roads plan has been proposed here as a means of right-sizing road systems keeping maintenance semi-local while improving resources, planning and staff.  It is a win-win for every party.  The state is relieved of significant responsibility, counties and cities are not dumped on them what they cannot afford and tremendous cost savings are realized by all parties involved. With the regional roads plan, no state is too big to provide high standard roads to every county and city.

Return to REGIONAL ROADS: WHY REGIONAL ROADS? See Part 1 >>>>

Return to EXAMPLES OF POTENTIAL REGIONAL ROAD CONCEPTS See Part 2 >>>>

Regional Roads: Why Regional Roads? (Part 1)

Devolution nationwide continues to gain steam as the political environment favors increased local control.  Almost no state has added any new highway mileage in decades, cities and towns are taking roads from counties, and the number of local governments continues to increase creating less and less accountability for how roads are maintained.  The purported benefits of this are debatable, but the reality is that placing more and more authority for roads on a high number of small counties, cities and towns amounts to being a very popular bad idea.  It creates a bigger structural problem to solve a smaller cost problem, which is that states lack the resources with current tax rates to manage larger state road systems.  

All states and most territories have at least some locally maintained roads.  Just because they are common does not mean they really work all that well.  It is common knowledge that local governments are just not going to produce the same results as the state does in terms of standards and frequency of maintenance, and the real reason that states hand off roads to counties is that they want them to be responsible for the cost of construction, including minor resurfacing.  That doesn't mean that they are also prepared to take on technical operations like traffic engineering nor do they have the resources to perform traffic studies or maintain roadway safety features as often as the state.  They do not have the economies of scale, and a small jurisdiction cannot justify an expensive cost for equipment, materials, and storage for larger roadway operations making them inefficient by default.  Unfortunately, increasing local control in terms of service delivery has very mixed results with no real alternative being offered at present.  It should be noted that there are success stories are rare and usually in the case of:

• Wealthier cities breaking off of very high population counties (usually with a population of around 25,000-45,000)
• Very large population, mostly consolidated counties regaining control of their own roads
• Consolidated city-counties (popular primarily in the South)
• Counties and larger cities who contract with the state to maintain state routes 

In these examples, note the following: the wealthier cities have a large tax base for a small geographic area and are depriving the larger region the economies of scale and better standards.  They also still have the issue of having "the foxes guarding the henhouse" in that oversight is low to non-existent.  As to large population counties with broad powers, these are relatively rare.  Most high population counties are carved up into numerous cities and towns that cut into their landlocked tax base, and counties like Los Angeles County where the county provides road maintenance on behalf of most cities are also uncommon.  Counties as large as states that can act as states in this manner.  Less than 50 counties in the entire nation have populations exceeding a million residents, and of those the amount that have the purchasing power and responsibility of states can be counted on one hand.  Fairfax County in Virginia doesn't even operate a county road system relying on VDOT for maintenance although they assist heavily in planning and funding construction projects.  Consolidated city-counties, while they do provide better efficiency and lower costs, are still just a larger city and still have many of the same problems of larger cities.  Because of their status, they are unlikely to contract with neighboring jurisdictions in the suburbs due to the fear that those jurisdictions might be annexed into the city.  While Davidson County, merged with Nashville, has very high standards for its roads, those benefits do not stretch to neighboring counties or municipalities in greater Nashville.  They stop cold at the county line in every direction.  Other consolidated city-counties are not as effective, and their populations/tax bases are far below Nashville.

Noting these exceptions, it is still important to point out that counties, townships and municipalities by their very nature almost always both duplicate services and raise basic costs.  The only way they avoid this is by cutting corners.  The easiest way to cut corners is by maintaining roads below regulation, deferring maintenance on anything deemed "non-essential", avoiding any traffic studies on their roads that might increase liability, and not having any engineers hired as either staff or consultants to oversee their roads.  This is unethical, but in many states it is legal.  This way, nobody can be held accountable for shoddy workmanship or substandard roadway conditions since technically no engineering was involved.  Wealthier jurisdictions ultimately cannot avoid liability and do begin to move away from this practice, but not always!  This is amplified not only because the state operates a separate system within the same county but also when other counties and cities are in close proximity spreading the available tax base very thin.  

It is important to note that counties cannot grow to assume more responsibility to enhance their tax base nor services.  While cities can grow, it is not often that a city is capable of growing large enough to provide even county-level services.  The average city or town usually has a population of between 1,000 and 5,000 residents, so the comparison to a major city such as New York, Atlanta or Dallas would be disingenuous.  What if this barrier was removed for cities, counties and townships to provide certain services?  What if these geographically constricted cities, counties and towns could turn to their neighbors and start shaking hands to combine resources in such a way to provide higher standard, more cost-efficient and better maintained roads than they currently can within the confines of their geography while still maintaining their local autonomy?  The regional roads plan is how that can be done.

Moreover, it is not at all beneficial when the responsibility for roads transfers from the state to a low population county, city or town: especially when state-level financing must be divided across a very large number of jurisdictions.  The stated benefits of local control are simply not realized when a technocratic state agency reverts that responsibility to a large number of small political entities with the funding pie too small to assure that the purchasing power, financial flexibility or technical expertise is in place to provide an equivalent service to what the state is otherwise able to provide.  LTAP (Local Technical Assistance Program) is also not working, because it provides no actual supervision, does not guarantee access to engineering services, and it is not raising the standards high enough under the current structure nor promoting uniformity across all jurisdictions.  More oversight is needed.  If the state is not going to relieve counties and small municipalities of what they are unable to do well, another way is needed.

A NEED TO UPDATE THE NORTH CAROLINA PLAN

First, it should be noted that state populations and their subsequent road networks are significantly larger than they used to be.  When the Brookings Institute proposed consolidating entire county road networks under state control in the 1930's, the nation's public highway system was still in its infancy and the US population was far lower.  There were very few multi-lane highways, most roads were still unpaved, numerous bridges and road segments were private toll roads, and state highway systems nationwide were not even a decade old.  North Carolina was the first state to adopt this plan.  While the North Carolina plan has been successful, the system has not been free of problems.  The reality is that the states that embraced the North Carolina plan have either abandoned it (such as Maryland) or are struggling to balance modern transportation demands with the maintenance and improvement of smaller local roads (such as Virginia).  Inter-regional conflicts for road funding further endanger such systems with accusations that the entire road network in one region is being cheated out of road funding in favor of another in lieu of a few major routes.  State DOT's are frustrated that they have to maintain local roads when it means less money to cover large-scale construction projects.  Today, only four states fully adopted the North Carolina plan and only 20% of states have adopted a system that fully relieves counties and low population municipalities of maintenance of federal-aid eligible roadways.  With shrinking federal-aid, high inflation, state governments leery of raising taxes, and rising construction costs, every one of these larger state road systems are just one election away from a sudden move to dump all of these roads back onto local governments.  What the local agencies need is a counter proposal and backup plan if they don't want to end up like 80% of states with a huge responsibility for both streets and highways without the resources to maintain them right.

On top of that, two of the four states that have adopted this special state-controlled county road system either partially or in whole have seen a huge increase in population from when the systems were established.  North Carolina had 3 million residents in 1931.  Today that population is approaching 11 million.  Virginia, who established the similar Byrd Road Act in 1932, had a population of 2.5 million when the system was created.  Today, that population has exploded to 8.7 million.  However, despite both states having more than tripled in population, that population tends to be clustered in a few major metropolitan areas.  Rural areas in both states have been growing slowly or losing population in favor of these larger metropolitan areas thus leaving these counties, cities and towns increasingly strapped for funds.  This means that rural areas need to be looking beyond their boundaries to create efficiency, offer a full scope of services, and provide high quality public roads.  Even urban areas by and large are likewise being very constrained by balancing local needs with the needs of the entire state: especially when metropolitan counties are carved up into many smaller municipalities.  

The paradox of the urban areas is that the push for self-governance increases with the population, so the economies of scale needed for good roads often do not materialize.  The Virginia and North Carolina systems also excluded larger cities meaning that cities that actually do need the benefits of centralization are unable to join the secondary road system.  Obviously, the state does not want to be responsible for 100% of the roads, but let's not forget that in both systems the state both owns and maintains these roads in contrast with Puerto Rico where the territory maintains 100% of the roads but only actually owns around a quarter of that meaning that they rely on local funding for other roads that they simply expand state-level services onto.  That division between jurisdiction and maintenance is an essential component of a regional roads plan where consolidated efforts do not require ownership or a shift in funding to a whole other level of government.

It is also no surprise that the North Carolina plan states are also increasingly upset by the lack of funding and action on a state level for their congested, outmoded roads.  It should be pointed out, however, that one of the four North Carolina Plan states is not having the difficulties that Virginia and North Carolina are having.  Delaware, one of the smallest states in the nation, is made up of only three counties.  Functioning on a compact level, Delaware has been able to maintain tremendous efficiency by keeping state control of both major roads and county roads partly because it is still close enough to the center of government to be manageable.  With no competing regions or large swaths of rural area far from the state capital, it is probably the most successful example of the North Carolina plan.  It obviously helps that the entire state of Delaware is in effect one region.  The only difference between Delaware's road system and a regional system is that the DelDOT maintains both highways and county roads vs. a regional system where the three counties would operate a statewide joint operation separate from DelDOT that could include contracting with cities and towns but would not include highways.

States like Virginia have become financially and structurally overwhelmed with the costs of maintaining local roads under a single state agency.  Perhaps dividing that responsibility into regions will help restore the efficiency that Virginia's unique road system was designed to do.

Local control advocates in their defense of devolution cite examples of larger population jurisdictions that do a good job while ignoring the fact that the majority of local governments are very low in population and are never going to measure up.  It is disingenuous to compare Nashville-Davidson County in Tennessee to a rural county in the state like Bledsoe.  It is apples and oranges.  With a population of over 700,000 residents, the agency functions like a state within a state as it should while Bledsoe with less than 15,000 residents is never going to see the results of Nashville unless the county grows by almost 5000% and it is consolidated with its only city, Pikeville.  Naturally, this is something that is not likely to happen anytime soon, if ever, even though it is a growing county.  Even though statewide funding is more than adequate overall, the 95 counties that make up Tennessee are far too numerous to provide the quality and consistency that residents of Nashville-Davidson County enjoy.  What if the benefits that Nashville-Davidson enjoys were expanded into the entire metropolitan region of Nashville or beyond?

A sharp decline in road quality is observed here as Ridge Road in Nashville-Davidson County crosses into Cheatham County.  Cheatham County has a population of under 40,000 compared to Davidson's 600,000.  However, both are part of the Nashville MPO (Google Street View image).

Local control advocates will go further to state that this is simply an urban-rural divide where it should just be accepted that rural areas have less money and that things will improve as the population catches up, but how much population does it take?  A county with 11,000 resident is not likely to bloom into a county with 100,000 residents any time soon, and that is usually the threshold necessary for a county to be effective at creating a road maintenance that is capable of meeting professional engineering standards unless such a county is able to normalize its costs through contracting with a state or other outside jurisdictions.  Major road safety deficiencies can also be found on the local roads in much higher population counties such as those surrounding Nashville as is demonstrated by the photo above.  Regardless, Tennessee DOT is not interested in assuming local responsibility for roads even if the counties and cities paid them for the privilege.  In fact, local agencies being able to voluntarily pay state agencies to provide routine maintenance services on locally-owned roads and streets has rarely ever been successful.  The few times such programs were enacted they were typically short-lived.  It was always a good idea, but the states themselves saw no benefit in stretching their resources to cover lower classification roads, and they were able to successfully convince people that "too many roads" was a bad thing as if those roads were just garbage that could all just be thrown in a dumpster.  In terms of how some local agencies have kept them up over the years, they essentially did become garbage.

Instead of waiting for perfect circumstances, action needs to be taken.  Public safety should not be jeopardized with local accountability suppressed just to divide road responsibility based on an inefficient and archaic government structure laid out in the days of horse and buggy.  The conditions present in the 1930's with smaller local governments that led to the North Carolina Plan are still present today, but the increase in population has made it a major factor in fewer areas than the 1930's or even the 1980's.  Nevertheless, weak accountability and local political whims continue to make locally-maintained roads a sketchy proposition.  What has changed since the 1930's the most, however, are the increasingly powerful metropolitan areas competing with rural areas far from those cities for transportation funding while the revenue sources on a state level continue to decline.  While these issues might justify more local control, that does not mean that local control should necessarily shift all the way to a county or municipal level.  Instead, this suggests that a state's local road responsibility should be divided into regions that rest above a county level but below a state level as a means of tackling transportation issues related to smaller areas that couple nearby rural areas with approximate larger urban areas.  Nashville doesn't need to worry about Memphis, but they should be there to help their neighboring counties and cities in greater Nashville have access to the resources that they currently enjoy.

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ARE TOO SMALL FOR A BIG RESPONSIBILITY

Another issue is the structure of counties: primary those east of the Mississippi River.  Rural county roads in many Western states typically have much higher road standards despite a sparser population due to the presence of a small number of very large counties.  In observing these large counties, it is clear that road funding distribution from the state is at far higher levels with far greater efficiency even in counties that have a very low population.  In other words, if the state has $250 million a year to spend on local services, that $250 million would stretch much further in a state with 40 counties than the same state with 100 counties.  If each county got the same amount, 40 counties would get $6.25 million a year to cover all basic services while the same county in a state with 100 counties would receive $2.5 million.  Guess which one is more likely to spend some of that money to hire professional staff and develop a traffic operations unit?

The example above shows how a county with 2,000 residents in Washington State or California is in far better shape than the same in Georgia, Texas, or Tennessee.  Especially important is that professional engineering standards are more consistently followed when a state has far fewer local jurisdictions fighting for a piece of the pie simply because the state can more easily finance state-aid funds for local engineering programs as was shown.  If the state personally financed one traffic engineer and one PTOE at $200,000 a piece, the cost for the state with 40 counties would be $8 million while the same in the state with 100 counties would be $20,000,000.  Needless to say, the state with more counties is less likely to finance something like that. The result is that it is much more possible for counties to establish a proper organizational structure when state funding on the local level is not spread thin over a very large number of jurisdictions.  It is clear that these same goals are not being met in all but a handful of states east of the Mississippi River because state-local cooperation is weaker, average rural county populations are lower, and fragmentation of government is much higher.  In other words, you do not necessarily need the state to take over county roads and municipal streets to bring local roads to proper levels, but the best results come when a state has fewer political subdivisions covering much larger areas with equivalently larger populations and tax bases.  Merging counties and cities is unlikely, but doing this on a specific-service level is possible.

Consider the eastern vs. western states.  Tennessee and Virginia both have 95 counties.  In comparison, Oregon has only 36 counties and Washington State has only 39 counties despite both being much larger in land area than either Tennessee or Virginia.  Oregon has 98,000 square miles and Washington State has 71,000 square miles.  In comparison, Virginia has 43,000 square miles and Tennessee has 42,000 square miles.  In other words, both Virginia and Tennessee have 60% more counties while both states are at least 40% smaller.  While these smaller counties may provide some benefits over large geographic areas, they do not provide an efficient means of assuring that the locally-owned transportation networks are well maintained.  It is simply too fragmented to provide the funding or oversight necessary.  This is what drove the Mid-Atlantic states, including Virginia, to pursue a top-down approach to local road maintenance in the first place.  However, the deeper history, culture, and political dominance of these counties is undeniable requiring that an alternative approach must be considered.  If the state does not want or is unable to handle the responsibility in Tennessee unlike Virginia and the counties are not able to do an acceptable job, then is there an alternative?  Yes, in fact, there is.

Compare this road in Jefferson County, WA to the previous road shown in Cheatham County, TN.  Jefferson County has a population just under 30,000 residents compared to the nearly 40,000 in Cheatham County yet Oak Bay Road, a county road, is maintained to equivalent levels of state highways in Tennessee.  The main difference is that Jefferson County is one of 39 counties in lieu of 95 counties in Tennessee.  (Photo from Google Street View)

WESTERN COUNTIES vs. EASTERN COUNTIES: A LITMUS TEST FOR REGIONALIZATION

Comparing states that generally lack major engineering issues along roads maintained by local governments and those that have them typically, a pattern emerged.  That pattern is that both the land area per county and population per county needs to be above a certain threshold to provide an adequate level of service per county.  The other observed factors that could affect local road quality include 

1. A very high level of devolution where ratios of local control exceed 90% (such as in Iowa) with a focus on farm-to-market roads.
   
2. States where there is less competition for funding between urban and rural areas (such as an Iowa and Montana).
3. States with fewer counties (Arizona) and/or more stringent controls on municipal formation and annexation (Maryland/Virginia).
   
4. Counties that are contracted to maintain state-owned roads (such as in Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan)
5. Service exchanges where the state provides technical services in exchange for non-technical services from local governments (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin)
6. States where county responsibility is limited to only regionally important roads due to the presence of townships (such as in New Jersey and New York)
7. Lastly, a greater percentage of state funding is directed more to a local level.

It should also be noted that townships present a complicated issue.  In states that allow townships to contract with counties, better results are noted vs. states who have separate township road systems AND states with counties who do not have townships.  Townships oddly provide protection to counties against city encroachment as counties are not competing with municipalities, and counties operate on a different level in that they maintain roads and streets within cities and towns.  In contrast, counties in states that do not have townships must transfer jurisdiction to the city or town when a city/town is formed or annexes land unless the county has a formal agreement with the city to provide all road maintenance on behalf of the city.  Those agreements are rare outside of very small population municipalities.  Perhaps county roads would be better in those states if state law allowed counties to "punch through" cities on roadways deemed to be of regional importance allowing cities and towns only to maintain minor streets.

Nevertheless, good results with this strategy have primarily been consistently noticed in only a few Midwestern states and are not reliable enough to be an acceptable variable.  It should also be noted that not all state DOT's are well-run and have numerous problems that affect road quality and do not promote a good roads culture: especially in very high population states with aging infrastructure such as California.  It should also be pointed out that in those Midwestern states (Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin specifically) that the state is a strong partner to counties, which has much to do with a certain political culture within the state.  This is why neither these Midwestern states nor states with township road systems are being used as examples when factoring in average county size and population.  The factors shown here relate primarily to states that lack such a culture with local governments that work largely independent of each other.  In other words, an environment that fosters good roads requires not only greater economies of scale, but also a good roads culture.  North Carolina is an example of where a good roads culture has helped promote better standards across the board along with state control of county roads.

Land area and population in relation to the number of local jurisdictions are both major factors in local road quality.  The importance of land area is that the presence of fewer jurisdictions mean that larger overall funding is available for each jurisdiction even if the jurisdiction has an otherwise very low population.  Similarly a higher population threshold is needed to create a coordinated effort among local agencies statewide to adopt higher standards by removing financial limitations as an excuse for both inaction and lack of intergovernmental cooperation.  Having these factors in place also makes it easier for a state to retrofit a local jurisdiction to handle its own needs such as financing a county engineer.  While it is no guarantee of best results, both the land area should exceed 1,500 square miles and average unincorporated county population should exceed 100,000 with the average population preferably exceeding 200,000 residents to be able to achieve even adequate engineering standards and economies of scale.  This is the only way that costs can be kept down while standards can remain sufficiently high.  Looking at 12 states in the West and Southeast shown in the charts below, only four exceeded the land area threshold and only two exceeded the 200,000 average population threshold.  Four states fell below the necessary 100,000 per county threshold and three had a land area under 500 square miles.  Clearly those states with the lowest numbers respectively have the most problems running an effective highway agency below a state level.

The charts above show the land area per counties and population per counties.  This is important to demonstrate that having fewer counties as well as higher populations within those counties are necessary for achieving efficient operation and higher engineering standards.  Obviously not all counties meet this population threshold, but it helps to have a higher average population and land area to achieve better funding distribution and a higher population per county assures that more counties have adequate resources to properly maintain roads.  As you can see Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia and Colorado rank lowest on population per counties and, except Virginia, similarly have trouble adequately managing a local roads program.  Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee also have the lowest land area per counties making management of local programs without state help difficult.

The classic remedy to this problem is local government consolidation.  However, the political realities are that a top down mandate to consolidate many counties into far fewer counties and municipalities has been very unpopular and has had almost no cases of happening since the 1930's.  The public may support consolidating some services, but the situation turns nasty when you start talking merging of police, fire and school districts into some mega-county while erasing local identities.  The idea of completely eliminating even one county usually requires a financial crisis sufficient that a county is forced to consolidate with another, but federal-aid programs to impoverished counties since the depression have mostly prevented this.  What makes financial sense does not make political sense, but the current system is broken.  With little incentive to change that system, the only other option besides the state level is to create a new functional layer of government that exists below the state level but higher than the county or municipal level.  In other words, local maintenance of roads based on county and municipal boundaries should be replaced with a regional structure that creates a "state within a state".  In part 2, the details and structure of a "Regional Road System" will be discussed.

Continue to Part 2 - REGIONAL ROADS: HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS See Part 2 >>>>

Continue to Part 3 - REGIONAL ROADS: EXAMPLES OF POTENTIAL REGIONAL ROAD CONCEPTS See Part 3 >>>>