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.  

Mileage Caps vs. Proportional Ratio Caps

Caps are often a popular method to manage things that seem to be growing out of control.  While they seem logical, it is important to think about a particular cap that this country has set that has not worked.  That cap is on the number of members in the House of Representatives.  Set in 1911, no more than 435 members are allowed in the House despite the country more than tripling in population since that time.  The result of this completely arbitrary cap has been massive gerrymandering that has led to severe political corruption, partisan gridlock and poor representation.  As evidenced by this misguided law, strict caps based on a randomly chosen number are a bad idea.  Let's imagine instead that a proportional cap had been created on Congress.  If that proportion was set based on the growth of the US population since 1911, today we would have 1,485 members of the House meaning far more local representation, less gerrymandering and the chance for competitive third parties to bring accountability to the electoral process.  Mileage caps for roads have a similar detrimental effect corrupting the way that states do business with local governments.

THE INSIDIOUS MILEAGE CAP: BAD TRANSPORTATION POLICY

The example with the House of Representatives has nothing to do with roads, but the concept of arbitrary caps does.  In this case, it is the mileage cap used by states to limit highway system expansion to a set mileage.  The mileage cap is essentially a state agency deciding that they will no longer accept any new miles into the state highway system regardless of overall gains in road mileage.  Usually when these caps are created, it is done as a hasty action as a means to stop the bleeding of funds for a road system that was growing past the point of efficiency or as a means to reign in politically motivated roadways that never had any reason to be on the highway system and were not otherwise part of a special farm-to-market highway network.  Mileage caps are typically based on a completely arbitrary number that is set that essentially rounds off what just happened to be the approximate state highway system mileage at the time usually rounded off.  The result, however, has been hardship for local governments and leads to the slow, but proportional devolution of the state highway system.

Old US 19E north of Elizabethton, TN is an example of an old alignment that is maintained below standards.  Lines are faded out, guardrails are damaged and signs are in disrepair along this stretch of roadway that was turned to the local government in 1988.  It is still designated a collector route, but if a mileage cap had not been in place it may have remained on the state system as a secondary state route.  (Google Street View, May 2012).

Why is this bad?  These states with such caps use the "lane miles" argument to justify a continued devolution of the highway system, but evidence in these states is that the local funding ratio likewise does not increase in relation to the proportional decrease in state responsibility.  Lane miles will almost always increase regardless of who is in charge, and the "lane miles" argument is a weak one since population and thus the state's tax base also increases in conjunction with added lane miles.  If the state doesn't want more lane miles, then they can always choose to build, widen or pave fewer roads focusing funding instead on operational improvements.  This Trojan Horse argument has nothing to do with the unfunded mandate known as the mileage cap.  In addition, far more miles go to the local governments than the mileage indicates.  This is because every time a new road is built and added to the state highway system, some road must be downloaded to the local government, especially when a roadway is entirely new construction instead of a relocation of an existing highway.

Old GA 184 was turned to local maintenance in 1989 as a result of mileage swaps.  It was turned to Banks County who clearly does not have sufficient means to maintain it.  It is a major collector route.  While the state has funded significant improvements to the road since this image was captured, the fact is that that the road was in a neglected, unsafe condition for over 25 years because it was transferred to a county unprepared for that responsibility.  (Image from Google Street View, May 2014).

Local governments are still largely dependent on state funding, and local governments are generally not the most efficient means of maintaining arterial and major collector roads.  This was detailed in the Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan.  When the state sets a mileage cap, it does not just mean that an old highway alignment is placed on the local level when a new road opens.  It also means that other highways, usually in rural areas, are also turned to local maintenance.  With no additional funding or state maintenance, roads like this tend to fall into disrepair under local control.  This is especially true when local policies and practices for road maintenance are already weak meaning that these local agencies are not going to make any special effort to maintain a former state highway vs. other local roads.  The need to "swap" roads simply leaves local governments with the cost of maintaining a road that they never built in the first place that they likely also lack sufficient means to maintain.  In all, it is a bad transportation policy and it weakens the abilities of local governments to manage limited funds by spreading available local funding even thinner.

What's also worse with mileage caps is that it prevents the road system from periodically being corrected to better adapt to new traffic patterns.  Roadways that no longer serve any statewide purpose are kept on the state system because the local agency does not want to lose those miles just to gain more on another road.  The states also start using these roads as "mileage banks" to withdraw at random just to deposit as added mileage for another new road meaning that the state has already deemed these older routes effectively useless.  Often times, a "lane mile" swap is even required thus a local agency is stuck with maintaining sections of roads twice as long as the new state routes.  Because of this, local agencies rarely propose any changes that would make sure that state routes actually line up with the best and most useful function.  If local agencies were not always threatened with losing state highway miles, this attitude would change and better routes would thus be developed.

THE RATIO CAP: A MUCH BETTER TRANSPORTATION POLICY

The ratio cap is a concept that balances the needs of the state with the needs of local governments.  If a local agency's road responsibility massively increases then likewise they should be seeing more roads turned to state control.  They shouldn't have to worry if it "meets state standards" or that they have to "swap out another road".  In fact, all counties and municipalities should be able to put out a wish list each year on qualifying roads to place onto the system with the state able to add them based on the greatest need.  The state then takes them over as-is and then makes the needed changes themselves.  Picture this example in "sample state".

• Sample State created a mileage cap in 1980 that restricted the state highway system to 10,000 miles
• In 1980, the sum of all public roads in the state was 80,000 miles
• Since 1980, the public road system has grown since then by 20,000 miles to 100,000 miles
• In 1980 the state ratio was 12.5% under state control
• In 2010, it had since dropped to 10%
• The state also built and took over maintenance of 2,000 miles of new roads thus transferring 2,000 miles of other roads from the state system to the local system
• This means that local agencies have had to take on an additional 20,000 miles of roadways without any additional funding from the state to do so
• This 20,000 mile mandate includes 2,000 miles of roads formerly maintained by the state

What is seen here is an incredibly unfair situation for the local agencies.  The state has essentially devolved 2% of the state highway system directly to the counties that they transferred to new road mileage while the counties have subsequently had to maintain 20,000 more miles of roads.  While the gas tax in sample state did not change, the available funding grew proportional to the population growth.  This means that essentially the state has created an unfunded mandate.  Local governments were not given an option of keeping these roads on the state system before, because the mileage cap was inflexible.  The state was adding 2,000 miles of newly constructed roads and had to take the mileage from other roads.  After much debate and frustration from local authorities, sample state caved and reversed their policy.  

• Seeing that the state ratio in 1980 was 12.5% when the cap was created, the state agreed to expand the state highway system back to the ratio it was in 1980
• The state will continue to maintain this ratio cap not exceeding 12.5%, but it will allow the road system to grow thereafter in proportion to total system growth
• This means that 2,500 miles will now be added to the state highway system
• 1,500 of the 2,000 miles turned to the local authorities are then restored to the state highway system since they were determined to remain of high enough functional classification and traffic volumes to justify restoring
• 1,000 miles of new state roads along existing local roads are added with mileage shared evenly among all 10 state highway divisions so that each division is able to add 100 miles of local roadways to the state system
• Many local agencies were then no longer torn between paving and upgrading miles of former state routes and other major local roads
• In 2015, the public road system grew an additional 500 miles
• Thus, the state allowed up to 63 more miles of roads to be added to the state highway system since 2010.  50 of those miles were new roads with a couple old alignments retained as business routes.  13 additional miles were distributed to all 10 districts with some used and some reserved for additional growth of the system.  
• While the state's responsibility increased, proportionally it did not change from 1980 after the mileage cap was replaced with a ratio cap and the 1980 ratio restored.

MILEAGE CAPS AND FUNDING ISSUES

Many states that have mileage caps set these caps due to funding being inadequate, but is this really an excuse to place more responsibility on local governments that are suffering even more financially?  Is funding not going to increase with population?  In recent years very few states have grown their state-owned highway system at all.  Several have also recently begun turning back roads to local agencies at an increasing amount such as Colorado and Iowa.  States like Florida recently dropped below 10% for the first time since the 1940's.  If the states are unable to raise new revenues, that doesn't mean that they should make local governments suffer more for it.  The system should still be growing proportionally regardless of this, and the increasingly poor condition of state roads should only highlight the need to create new funding sources.  It is NOT an excuse to burden counties and cities with roads they have an even harder time affording.  While the proposals that State and Local Road Reform proposes are designed to promote more operational efficiency, improve safety and upgrade engineering standards they are not designed to repave roads.  The only way to repave roads when the money runs out is to raise more money.  Turning roads to the local level either through mileage caps or large-scale turnback events is not going to raise that money: it will only mean that local agencies will have to do more with less and that the road system will subsequently become less efficient.

It is understood that one of the reasons for mileage caps is to force counties to take over segments of old alignments that they would refuse to give up otherwise.  In states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Maryland it is not uncommon to see dead end roads, including old alignments with long-closed bridges, remaining on the state system.  However, this is a mileage distribution issue not a road mileage issue: it is a management issue.  The state DOT should have the authority to say "this road is not necessary for statewide travel and will be returned to the local government" while transferring that mileage to a road that does serve statewide traffic.  It is ridiculous to see roads that obviously serve a statewide purpose as county roads so that a road that no longer serves any purpose except as a two-lane driveway remaining on-system.  You see this sometimes in Maryland where a state primary route in Pennsylvania becomes a county road in Maryland while five sections of an old alignment nearby are still state highways.  Assuming that the county road has equivalent mileage to those segments, does it not make sense for the mileage to be transferred?    

REAL EXAMPLES

Several states have openly advocated and advanced policies to transfer roads to the local level regardless of mileage.  These mileage caps also tend to mean mileage is lost instead of maintained at the level of the cap.  Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Kansas are some of the most recent examples.  Analysis of the road systems in these four states between 1992 and 2012 show that:

• Louisiana has instated a mileage cap with a net gain of only 12 miles
• Pennsylvania has lost 4,629 miles in those 20 years (the system began scaling back mileage beginning with a large-scale turnback event in 1984)
• South Carolina instated a mileage cap in 1993 but has officially turned back 245 miles
• Kansas's state road mileage dropped by 356 miles despite a gain in local road mileage of 6,959 miles.

State ratios dropped, respectively, from 28.4% to 27.2% in Louisiana, from 37.4% to 33.2% in Pennsylvania, from 64.9% to 62.5% in South Carolina and 8.0% to 7.3% in Kansas.  It should be granted South Carolina is a unique situation with its high level of state responsibility, but is clear that most states today are not a friend to local governments in terms road funding and maintenance responsibility.  

Let's look at two states with known mileage caps comparing data that demonstrates the proportional decay of their state highway systems:

Indiana

Indiana is well known for its 12,000 mile cap on state highway mileage.  This cap keeps the system small in relation to other Midwestern states, and unlike its neighbors on each side, the state lacks a township road program to consolidate county responsibility to a few major roads.  While this might seem more efficient, these are still lower population counties.  The resulting county road standards unfortunately mirror the unpredictable conditions found on county roads throughout much of the Southeast with some more populous counties and cities doing a better job than others.  Regardless, the state has been so prudent that mileage is actually well below the mileage cap and declining.

In 1992, INDOT was responsible for 11,294 miles or 12.3% of the road system.  In 2012, that number dropped to 11,006 miles or 11.3 % of the road system.  This means that officially local governments had to take over 288 miles of former state roads, but the actual local road mileage jumped 5,234 miles since that time.  This means if a ratio cap had been set in 1992 at the rate it was then, the state road system should already be close to approaching 12,000 miles at 11,936 miles.  If the rate had been 12,000 miles then, the rate would have been 13.0%.  This means that system should have grown to 12,647 miles in that 20 year span: a modest net gain of 647 miles which would have at least retained state highway mileage as new roads were built.  Instead, local governments have had to take on nearly 300 additional roads instead of INDOT gaining around 650 miles.  The state would have not been hurt by this modest gain, but the counties and cities that lost these highways certainly were.  

What Indiana should consider is going back to the date when the mileage cap was instated and calculate the ratio in relation to what the total public system mileage was that year.  That ratio should then be calculated based on the current public road mileage to determine the correct road mileage that the state should be maintaining.  In this example, it was 13% but considering that the mileage cap was likely created during the 1960's or 1970's, the ratio is probably closer to 15%.  This means that 14,593 miles should be on the state highway system adding a sum of 3,587 miles.  

Georgia

For around 20 years Georgia enjoyed one of the best funded road networks in the Southeast due to an earnest commitment to use road funding for only roads.  Plentiful revenues were funneled into massive road projects all over the state meant to both keep up with the fast growth in North Georgia while attempting to improve the economic conditions in rural counties in other areas.  This also meant that the state highway system should have been growing to help the fast growing state keep up with the demand for new and wider roads.  Instead, GDOT has enforced a strict mileage cap since 1963 when the legislature panicked over the growth of the state highway system.  The cap in 1963 was put in place to force the state to maintain the roads they had built thus stopping the growth of politically-motivated state highways additions.  While that seemed like a good policy at the time, that did not mean that slow growth could not have continued since then.  

During the period of massive system growth via new construction during the 70's and 80's, the state likewise turned back between 1,000-3,000 miles of state routes to the local governments to funnel to these new roads.  Most of these highways were located in rural counties who lacked adequate resources to maintain them thus the condition of those roads declined markedly.  While the state later worked with counties to greatly improve the condition of the worn out pavement on those roads all throughout the 1990's and early 2000's and is now using federal-aid for safety upgrades, these aging roads are still proving too much for local governments to adequately maintain on their own.  In other words, the counties are not really doing much themselves to maintain these roads.  They're just waiting for the state to help them when at one point the state maintained them consistently.

While statistics for mileage cannot be located back to 1963, the mileage for 1967 is available.  At that time, the state system was around 18-19% of the total road system mileage with state system mileage not yet reaching the 18,000 mile cap until 1972.  The first data including city streets available was in 1975 and showed a state ratio of 17.9%.  That ratio has dropped today to 14.3%.  This means that in 40 years, the ratio of state control has dropped by 3.7% while the local road system has increased by 24,000 miles: an increase of 19.2%.  

What this means is that Georgia should have enacted an incremental increase of mileage over the past 40 years.  Based on 1975 statistics alone this comes out to at least 4,528 miles.  This mileage could place the majority of functionally significant former state highways back onto the state highway system as well as adding many new roads that are currently maintained by county and city governments.  This would thus relieve local governments of many expensive to maintain roads in both poorer rural areas and in areas with high traffic and population.  This averages to 28.5 miles of roads per county or 646.9 miles per GDOT district. 

If GDOT does not change any other policy, the state system should be expanded to more closely align with the original state control ratio in 1963.  This would mean the state assuming control of the thousands of miles of federal-aid secondary road projects they built.  Under this, the state ratio would also bump higher to around 20% meaning that 7,000 miles of state highways would fall under state control.  This would mean not only the restoration of all former state routes that remain today functionally classified as major collector or arterial roads but also the addition of many other major collector roads.  The highway system would then be allowed to grow proportionally to at least be adequate to not only prevent unjustified mileage swaps, but also to occasionally add new roads to the system.  

CONCLUSION

If the goal of states is to improve their state road system, then that state road system should have reliable mileage that is not gradually chipped away as the system grows with a commitment to place that mileage on the roadways that provide the greatest benefit.  This blog has demonstrated that roadways transferred to local governments are frequently maintained at well below the standards they were as state highways.  Local governments have also shown that they do not have the resources to expand their responsibility periodically onto more and more roads.  These states who have mileage caps in place need to revisit and revise their policy, preferably rectifying the mistake they made by replacing their mileage cap with a ratio cap.  Furthermore, they need to subsequently restore state ratios to their prior levels when the cap was put in place.  While states may feel strained from added mileage, this cost is a sunk cost.  Somebody has to maintain these roads, and the states are the ones best suited to do it or these roads would not have been state roads in the first place.

Farm-To-Market Cooperative Plan - Description [Part 1]

Should every cul-de-sac be part of a comprehensive, consolidated road network?  In terms of economic sense, yes, but perhaps states and regions want to maintain local control for the smallest streets.  This means that one potential option to solving issues with local roads is to avoid a comprehensive approach choosing instead to designate only certain roads as part of an expanded highway system that is large enough to cover every consequential roadway while keeping the truly local roads local.  This plan scales down the comprehensive approach that shifts an entire responsibility onto one or another agency, but the ideas that will be presented here offer some new approaches to an old idea.  The idea for farm-to-market roads as a concept are nothing new in the United States, and the structure varies by state.  Usually they fall into one of three categories: 

• A system of county roads that receive special designations and/or funding from the state (Iowa, Florida)
• Roads maintained by the county in lieu of a dominant township government (New Jersey, Wisconsin) 
• State maintained roads of lower functional classification, funding and usage (Missouri, Texas). 

Farm to market systems are designed with the intent of leaving only the truly local roads local in lieu of other state systems where state responsibility is only placed on the most principal of corridors leaving the responsibility of many major highways in the hands of the local governments.  Typically, they only cover in conjunction with primary state routes about 25-35% of the overall road network although an exceptions exists today in one state: South Carolina.  Formerly Alaska had 50% of their roads under state control, but that ratio has since dropped to 35%.  The purpose of these farm to market roads are typically to provide very closeby highway access to nearly all residents of the state and/or to provide numbered routes to smaller towns, communities and neighborhoods not served by the principal thoroughfares.  The examples of county-maintained farm-to-market roads are irrelevant in the instance that the state controls these roads, but they are relevant to the development of a regional system for that purpose and often contain mileage caps that limit the mileage signed or maintained to a certain number of roads.  In Florida's example, the current farm-to-market system was actually formerly a state maintained, locally constructed system until it was downgraded in 1982. 

STATE-CONTROLLED FARM TO MARKET ROADS

When the state controls farm-to-market roads, they are typically not actually referred to by that name.  Usually they carry the name "secondary", "supplemental", "state-aid" or "county route" with Texas the only state that actually uses that term for those roads.  The purpose of having a system divided into secondary and primary routes in many states aside from what is described above is to relieve counties of responsibility for roads that typically are of higher cost to maintain and responsibility creating a strain on local governments even though on a state level they are lower in cost and importance to maintain than major highways.  Across the country, varying degrees of farm-to-market highway systems exist with most maintained by the state government.  The ones that relate to the plan presented here are systems that range in ratio between 25 and 40% under state control and exist in 12 states, but primarily in the states of Texas, Missouri, Maine, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.  

In many cases farm-to-market systems contain a rule that at least some cost or responsibility is passed on to local governments even if the state owns and is otherwise responsible for those roads.   In Texas, farm-to-market roads in urban areas are maintained by the state, but construction costs are passed on the local governments.  Nonetheless, a farm-to-market system by design shares costs in such a way as to make administration, funding and maintenance more reliable and more cost efficient on roads that are of regional importance.  Farm-to-market roads also create a balance where the states have enough responsibility so that the state DOT is structured for higher standards and increased supervision in-house thus less reliant on contractors while counties and cities who lack the resources to provide sufficient maintenance supervision are generally prevented from maintaining roads of higher speeds and function.  In addition, farm-to-market roads offer an advantage over comprehensive systems in that you avoid the patchwork of "contract" local agencies meaning that cities, towns and certain counties are not able to opt out of state supervision of these roads except on a case-by-case basis.

WHAT ACTUALLY CONSTITUTES A "LOCAL" ROAD?

The largest issue with local roads is the fact that not all "local" roads are truly local.  In fact, most states maintain less than half of federal-aid eligible roadways.  This means there is no consistent standard on what consists of a "farm-to-market" road.  States like Georgia, Tennessee and Montana are only responsible for about half of their farm-to-market mileage based on functional classification (NOTE: Georgia does not have an official farm-to-market category).  States like Kansas, Colorado and Oklahoma have no responsibility for farm-to-market category roads nor do they have any special statewide system designated for these roads.  This means that roadways that are dubbed as local by state authorities are not, in fact, local in all cases.  Inversely, states that do have larger farm-to-market networks are sometimes responsible for roads classified as "local".  Kentucky, for instance, has many functionally local state highways.  Nationwide, the functional highway system and its ratios is shown in the chart below.

Functional classifications from 2012 (Source: FHWA Statistics)

The functional classifications shown in the chart above described as follows: 

• Principal Arterial (interstates, freeways, expressways and major surface highways): 5.4%
• Minor Arterial (other major routes, mostly state maintained): 5.9%
• Major Collector (minor state routes and major local roads): 13.1%
• Minor Collector (shorter local connecting roads): 6.5%
• Local (local connecting and local residential): 69.1%

What this chart demonstrates is that while most states require local agencies to maintain between 80 and 90% of the public road inventory, the actual local ratio is 69%.  In other words, 30.9% of the road system is considered higher classification than local with 24.4% of that total arterial or major collector.  State highway systems clearly are not lining up with that 25-31% ratio in most states with ratios maintained by the states averaging between 10 and 15% of the highway system.  Devolution advocates fail to note that this is the case assuming that these low state ratios are normal when in fact they are a tremendous strain on both county and state resources.  In fact, gas and other taxes tend to be far higher in states with substantial local control vs. states who maintain a larger ratio of highways while the percentage of roads in poor condition [see appendix at end] is typically higher in those same states as well.  In addition, when the state has too little responsibility it becomes an issue similar with local governments in that they are structurally less capable of doing as good of a job due to diminished economies of scale, fewer qualified staff members, fewer inspectors and greater reliance on contractors.  Thus, it is a myth to assume that a state with little direct responsibility will be able to provide better maintenance on state-owned roads and any evidence to the contrary is merely correlation.  

In addition, out of the 69% that is local, 10-15% of that dubbed "local" is actually not completely local.  This additional unofficial category, which will be dubbed "local connecting" often shows up as major roadways on other maps (such as Google) and should be differentiated from "local residential", which includes small dead-end roads, residential streets and most unpaved roads.  While useless for funding purposes, "local connecting" describes roads that are officially "local", but:

• Often travel longer distances than other functionally local roads
• Connect two or more roads
• Often serve as access to established communities or popular recreation areas
• Provide access to government facilities
• Actually serve a limited highway function such as an alternate route for an inadequate collector or arterial route (unpaved or substandard)
• Are often built to highway standards with higher speeds
• May provide the only access in and out of a particular community where geographical constraints limit access (mountainous or coastal areas)

For federal funding purposes, local connecting roads are not defined, but in actuality many local roads dubbed local should be minor collector.  Thus, the actual roads that are of sufficient design, use and maintenance needs to justify being part of a state highway system actually range from 35-45% statewide in most states.  

This is where local governments have a problem.  The problem is that local agencies are often having to budget for both construction and maintenance of roads that are highway-type roads with major costs and responsibility involved as well as small, low-traffic local roads and streets.  The needs for both are very different, and the resources required are quite different.  Local governments are best suited for this latter category where they typically do the best job, but even then some local responsibility should be centralized when it involves technical matters that involve a traffic engineer.  The latter functionally local category usually requires more frequent maintenance, but is less technical to maintain while the former category is usually more durable, but repairs usually require the expertise of traffic engineers more frequently.  Having local governments responsible for major roads might work in the Plains states where local county roads are typically flat, unpaved, straight, have very low traffic volumes and construction costs are lower.  However, this is not so much true in the more populous and mountainous regions of the country.  In some of the most populous states, local connecting roads are often paved, two lanes and indistinguishable from collector roads other than the fact these roads are not designated with a yellow or purple line on a functional classification map.  While the states might give them ample means to construct these roads, the resources to maintain them well are what they lack.  This is why a new approach is needed to these roads that exist within that gray area between truly local roads and state highways.

(Former) federal-aid eligible roads such as these two rural Tennessee county roads (Tiger Creek Road in Carter County and Cane Creek Road in Fentress County) are county-maintained roads built with federal-aid funds to state highway standards.  While Tennessee has since downgraded these roads to minor collector (not eligible for federal-aid), in most states these roads would still be eligible.  This photo demonstrates that while both counties have done an excellent job keeping the pavement in good condition, routine maintenance in other areas is clearly lacking.

FARM-TO-MARKET ROAD NETWORKS ARE CHRONICALLY ILL BUT NOT TERMINALLY ILL: THEY CAN BE HEALED WITH NEW METHODS

These days farm-to-market systems are in trouble.  Many reasons are being thrown around as an excuse for devolution of funding and responsibility to local governments, but the main ones involve the declining revenues from gas taxes.  The irony is that the other funding sources for local governments are not working very well either.  Property tax rates are routinely capped, and these are the only guaranteed funding source to local governments.  Many states also provide local government funding options in addition to their own funds.  One of those is a local sales tax initiative.  The problem is that sales taxes in rural areas are pretty much dependent on whether a community has a Wal-Mart, and communities that have long relied on sales taxes are seeing declining revenues partially due to internet sales and the overall decline in brick and mortar retail.  Otherwise, local option gas taxes and gasoline excise taxes are being used as funding sources for local governments.  None are enough and none are leading to any efficiency to adequately fund operations and maintenance for each individual county and municipality.  

Traditionally, the approach to substandard county roads that could not be fixed by other means was to simply expand the state highway system.  Instead of using state forces to maintain entire rural county road networks, the states decided to take over a larger percentage of federal-aid eligible roads along with some of the local connecting roads such as what was done in Kentucky, Missouri and South Carolina.  What typically happened is that the state would adjust local payments and/or raise the gas tax transferring thousands of miles over a short period of time to state control.  Usually this was coupled with a major road building program where the state would commence paving and reconstructing roads using federal-aid money where the counties were previously not doing this work.  The counties were then subsequently relieved of this responsibility after the upgrades to those roads were made allowing them to lower property taxes and focus on the least traveled roadways that were less technical to operate.  The majority of such initiatives were commenced during the 1930's-1950's with the last of such initiatives executed to a lesser extent in Tennessee during the early 1980's.  The plan worked well in most states throughout the 20th century, but had early failures in the 70's with widespread problems today.  It was controversial even in its day often viewed as a "power grab" using "roads for votes" despite the obvious benefits of centralizing the responsibility of road maintenance to the state level.

Kentucky maintains a very large state highway system consisting of 37% of their roads under state control.  This includes almost all federal-aid eligible routes and a few functionally local routes.  While the state does an excellent job on routine maintenance, it is clear that state funding is otherwise inadequate for any substantial local improvements.  If Kentucky's system was split into primary and secondary, a new division of responsibility could be created.  Secondary roads could then be constructed and resurfaced with local funds including local funding from state sources while the state would continue routine maintenance on these roads.  With that division of responsibility, perhaps the road system could be better maintained than it is today.

The funny thing about this approach was that major road building was also going on in states who did not adopt this system.  Many states in the Deep South also took advantage of federal-aid money and began also repaving and reconstructing these primitive roads into highway-type roads from the 1950's into the early 80's.  The difference was that these other states transferred these roads back to the counties when they were completed.  For years, counties struggled to maintain these new, expensive roads while the other states who took them over enjoyed well-maintained roads.  This situation, however, began to change as these roads aged and the states struggled to balance demands for newer, larger and more expensive to maintain roads vs. these two-lane lesser traveled highways when states were unwilling to raise taxes to cover them.  In contrast, counties who had complained bitterly for years about the deteriorating condition of their roads lead to states permitting counties to explore new revenue sources.  What made sense then stopped making sense, because there was an imbalance of funding due to shifting priorities and declining purchasing power.  

States who previously had ample and plentiful revenue through gas taxes were discovering that gas tax revenues were not keeping pace with inflation, economics and improving fuel-efficiency in cars.  This reality came at the worst time as the political climate changed so that legislators and governors were unwilling to massively raise taxes to cover the added costs to maintain large state highway networks.  Added to this was the fact that gas taxes have almost never been indexed to the rate of inflation.  Had these states indexed the gas taxes to inflation, revenue streams would have remained consistent and a "crisis" would have likely never taken place.  In the long term, brinksmanship ultimately costs much more as deteriorated roads are far more expensive to fix than roads on a regular maintenance schedule.

At the same time, counties were beginning to gain new revenue sources through changes in state laws that gained much stronger support than state-level revenue increases.  Local sales taxes, fees and local gas tax initiatives by and large have been more successful than state-level revenue increases meaning that counties and municipalities revenue streams are much better than in the past.  These new revenue sources became much more popular when pursued on a local level than when pursued on a state level.  For instance, one cent sales tax referendums are routinely voted in when advertised for use only within a single county while they have consistently failed in a referendum on a state or regional level.  This presents a problem for states who continue to be in charge of large state road systems with available funding for a road building operation largely transferring from a state to local level.  This has resulted in a desire to shift not just financial responsibility, but entire road responsibilities back to the local level.  While some devolution is merited, this is a very short-sighted and costly strategy.  That is the root of why the secondary roads strategy needs to be updated.

LOCAL PRIORITIES VS. STATEWIDE PRIORITIES

Regardless of this, what did not change is that the majority of counties and municipalities are still ill-suited for routine road maintenance.  What counties and cities gained in construction funding they did not gain in the ability to operate a professional road maintenance operation.  While local roads today are as smooth, modern and well-built as they have ever been, safety and engineering standards remain low with little chance of improving without either a huge increase in state-aid or sharing of services among local agencies to address more technical matters.  Local road systems, despite improved funding, also are a very inefficient means to maintain roads even though they remain a far more efficient way to distribute funds and obtain funding for road improvements off of the major highways.  This is why both vast local road networks and large state-controlled highway systems have in many ways failed.

In addition, the transfer of farm-to-market roads to the local level has led to poor connectivity.  Farm-to-market projects of the 50's and 60's ultimately were left incomplete, and local governments are not going to typically pool resources to improve system connectivity at a higher cost when they have competing priorities.  If the county maintains cul-de-sacs and collector roads and a collector road would cost $10 million to reconstruct when that $10 million is also needed to pave all of those cul-de-sacs, guess which is going to be more politically viable?  Central planning of farm-to-market roads led to greatly improved connectivity as compared to today where resources are focused on improving roadways around new development.  This has resulted in tremendous traffic congestion on major highways.  This means not only are the local governments not prioritizing maintenance: roadway connectivity is also not important to them.  In fact, local agencies are increasingly employing tactics to discourage drivers from using local highways even if it is the shortest and best route and would relieve traffic from a congested state highway.

It should also be noted about Texas's strategy with urban farm-to-market roads.  One thing notable in every state that has adopted a larger state role, the general agitation for expanded local control comes from urbanized areas while rural areas prefer not to be hit with that responsibility without a huge increase in state funding that never materializes.  Perhaps Texas's model of splitting maintenance and construction responsibility should be adopted for other farm-to-market systems across the nation.  In addition, Missouri has sought to transfer all construction funding to the local level for its farm-to-market road network.  Florida also operated under this model for 27 years.

FARM TO MARKET ROADS AS A PARTNERSHIP

The result of this is that if states consider farm-to-market roads in the future, the modern model needs to exist as a partnership between states, regional planning organizations and local agencies.  States help to define and organize the system while making sure that state-level funding is available to finance the system.  Regions plan routes and organize the system to provide routine maintenance on behalf of local agencies for farm-to-market roads.  Local agencies are provided funding and use local financing as their voice to make sure that projects meet their needs and not just the needs of the region or state agency, but they do not maintain the roads themselves.  In all, it is also not a bad idea to have local agencies collectively cover the cost of farm-to-market roads administered by a state or regional agency if the local agencies agree to the terms of such an agreement.  By trying some entirely new approaches that centralize certain responsibilities where it makes the most sense while subsequently becoming less reliant on state-aid and planning, it is entirely possible to rescue these centralized systems in the twelve states who still have them while adding new ones in other states.

The idea is to relieve counties and cities irrespective of jurisdiction the responsibility for maintenance of the longer, better built and more expensive to maintain local roads and streets that carry higher traffic volumes leaving local agencies to focus maintenance efforts only on truly local roads and streets.  The truth is that local governments are not the best stewards of roadways that carry through traffic.  These roads need a more intensive, concentrated funding effort coupled with better economies of scale to assure uniformity in maintenance standards at a lower cost to what local governments can provide on their own while not losing focus of which roads are truly regional in importance.  Local governments should be worried about everyday maintenance of roads that are truly local.  This plan involves transferring these highway-grade local roads to something besides individual counties and municipalities.

TIGHT WADDED STATES MEAN THAT NEW FARM-TO-MARKET SYSTEMS HAVE TO LIMIT THE STATE'S DIRECT ROLE

The new funding realities prove that unless the states who have large farm-to-market systems are willing and able to massively raise revenues that the approach of having states operate large state highway systems have a very uncertain future.  The majority of states who have these systems also happen to be located in fiscally conservative states whose very large state highway systems were originally created during a far more progressive era when state maintained roads were deemed useful as a political bargaining tool and local governments were not blindly trusted to properly plan, construct and maintain roads.  Since these states are unwilling today to raise revenues to levels to continue to support these large scale road systems, most are falling into disrepair which is helping to build support for a transfer of a high percentage of these roads to the counties and municipalities.  In addition, states that have this political climate fear political backlash from constituents who would view the takeover of thousands of miles of local roads and streets as a "power grab", which is why the state role must be limited.  In no case has there not been some push to eliminate part or all of farm-to-market roads.

• In Texas, state leaders have been pushing to transfer farm-to-market roads in urban areas to cities and counties
• In Missouri, the state is attempting to increase local responsibility for farm-to-market roads by passing on primary construction and some maintenance responsibility to the counties
• In South Carolina, state leaders are looking to trim 30% of the state's responsibility as a means of avoiding a substantial tax increase to cover the state's large road system
• In Louisiana, parishes are being pushed to take over as many state-owned roads as possible
• In Pennsylvania, a turnback program has been in place since 1984 looking to shave off all non-federal-aid secondary state roads with over 10,000 miles already turned back
• Alaska's state responsibility dropped from 50% a few years ago to 35% today

It doesn't appear to be a very fertile environment for expansion of state control, does it?  While this is an unfortunate turn of events, the new strategies described in part two including either a separate state agency or the development of local collectives are designed to duplicate what the state DOT could provide without bothering the state DOT with roads they deem unimportant.  In addition, this new approach has a better chance of being adopted in other states who have small-scale state road systems considering the low-cost structure and practical aspects that come from combining local funding with the benefits of a basic state-maintained road structure.

The new approach is also very hands-off approach in terms of funding, but a very hands-on approach to maintenance.  Instead of focusing on the system from the perspective of a state with a larger system, this is approached from the perspective of states with small state highway systems such as in Florida, New Jersey or Kansas.  In states like these, a statewide or regional agency effectively takes over engineering and routine maintenance of a large portion of the local road system while leaving the big ticket items local responsibility.  Along with that, most road funding is directed to the local level with larger construction, paving and other improvements the financial responsibility of the local governments.  It is similar to what Florida had years ago except that the state is not responsible for any new construction and ownership of the roads actually would not transfer to the state.  The roads are effectively local roads receiving state-level maintenance.

Rock Creek Road, formerly GA 336, was turned to county maintenance in 1982.  It is clear from this image that the county has not been able to maintain everything to the level of the state.  If a statewide farm-to-market system had taken over this road from the state, it would mean that no part of this former route would have fallen into disrepair.

Part 2 describes two primary approaches to a cooperative system with funding options described for each.  These include:

• A statewide commission developed to consolidate maintenance of farm-to-market roads under one agency while keeping construction separate; this plan means that the state develops and finances operations of the farm-to-market network
• A cooperative approach where counties and municipalities pay into the system on a per-mile basis with responsibility divided up into planning regions instead of centralized on a state level

>>> CONTINUE TO PART 2 >>>