Now picture that road after a wet spring: a frost-heave crack running shoulder to centerline. The county engineer knows it needs work. It’s been an issue for years. But the budget math no longer works.
This is not a story about one county road, but rather about the heart of the American economy — and who is responsible for keeping it intact. And it is the story behind why I’m working with counties across America to ensure that, as Congress works through the next surface transportation reauthorization bill, counties have access to the federal funding needed to invest in the infrastructure our country has always relied on.
Counties own and maintain 44 percent of all public road miles and more than 229,000 bridges on the National Bridge Inventory. Many people mistakenly believe these are all two-lane rural roads, but that’s simply not the case anymore, especially in fast-growing areas.
And even where county-owned roads are two lanes, they are critical to our economic competitiveness. They help connect farms to markets, plants to ports and families to jobs. Nearly every trip in America, whether moving people or freight, begins and ends on a locally owned road.
We have always managed infrastructure on lean budgets, but every year, the math seems to get more difficult. Leaders in Oswego County, N.Y., have said the budget that once covered paving 40 miles of road now only covers 10.
The same is true of bridge costs. Rebuilding a small county-owned bridge in Minnesota cost $1.5 million in 2019. Today, it would cost $2.4 million, at least.
Most states impose restrictions on counties’ revenue authority, meaning we cannot simply raise additional funding to make up the difference. Instead, important projects get delayed, pared back or canceled altogether.
Maintaining a strong, safe and efficient transportation system requires coordination and partnership among all levels of government. I’ll use a personal example. Highway 287 through my home county — Wise County, Texas — is the most dangerous corridor we have. What was originally a long-haul freight route is now a daily commuter road, fueled by massive housing growth and development.
The Texas Department of Transportation’s (DOT) corridor study has identified 15 safety projects along the segment of 287 in Wise County, including frontage roads, overpasses and grade separation work. The price tag of this work in Wise County: more than $6 billion.
What most people don’t see is that even though 287 is a state-owned, Texas DOT-maintained highway, Wise County is the one fighting for it. We are using our energy and effort for these urgent safety projects, competing for Texas DOT dollars in a high-growth metroplex where urban freeway expansion dominates while also bringing our own dollars to fill funding gaps so these projects advance.
Even when issues aren’t on the roads we own, we identify pain points, develop actionable projects and work hand-in-hand with intergovernmental partners to move efforts forward. But large-scale projects like Highway 287 cannot move with local dollars alone, and the current way of distributing federal transportation dollars doesn’t align with needs on the ground.
Of the hundreds of billions of dollars annually that the federal government spends on transportation, the majority moves through formula funding programs to the states. Right now, only about 14 percent of these dollars are required to be spent in specific areas on projects identified with meaningful input from local stakeholders like counties. Think of efforts like Highway 287.
Congress has an opportunity to fix this in the surface transportation reauthorization bill, known as the BUILD America 250 Act, that was recently approved by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on a bipartisan vote. As the full House considers the legislation, our asks are simple: First, increase the share of federal formula funding shared with local and regional partners to 25 percent. Second, retain select discretionary grant programs counties can access as primary partners, not just subrecipients. Third, streamline project delivery and bolster planning to ensure that when dollars are available we can move quickly, before inflation erodes them.
These are not partisan asks. They are engineering asks, grounded in data on safety, condition and what our local economies need to thrive. The BUILD America 250 Act would make strides to implement these asks, but we need Congress to keep working in a bipartisan manner to finish the job and empower counties with the resources we need.
Back in Missouri, the road held today. It may hold next harvest. But the county engineer worries that deferred maintenance is accumulating faster than budgets can address, with the gap between what the road needs and what we can provide growing a little wider every year. That is not a Missouri or a Texas problem. It is an American problem.
Judge J.D. Clark, the president of the National Association of Counties, is serving his third term as the elected executive of Wise County, Texas.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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