Highway funding talk last week slipped into some politically dangerous territory.
The Governor's Working Group on Highway Funding is at least questioning the decades-old division of highway dollars among the state, cities and counties.
Highway money is extremely tight these days. While highway needs mount with each passing day, money to meet them is stagnant at best.
These appointees face the impossible task of finding some way to get more money to the problem.
One option could be reclaiming dollars that otherwise go to help cities and counties build streets, roads and bridges.
Traditionally, the state has shared highway dollars with the other entities of government. The state keeps 70 percent while giving cities 15 percent and counties 15 percent of the revenue.
The cities and counties collectively split up their respective shares by agreed-upon formulae; but each gets something.
While some might abandon the split altogether, at least one member of the working group, Frank Scott Jr., a state highway commissioner from Little Rock, suggested any new money be split differently. He suggested the state keep 80 percent and cities and counties divide the remaining 20 percent.
But any deviance from the 70-30 split that has been in place will still hit strong resistance.
Jerry Holmes, the Cleburne County judge and a working group member, called it a "nonstarter," as would his colleagues from around the state.
The 70-30 split has been good politics and certainly made passage of new highway taxes more palatable to mayors and city councils and to county judges and their quorum courts.
Without that political alliance, would any proposed tax hikes win approval?
That's the question the Governor's Working Group best answer before it goes farther down this particular funding path.
Arkansas is still a state of mostly rural counties, each with a strong need for continued maintenance of aging bridges and for more and better roads.
Without the state-generated funds their road departments receive, counties would have little revenue with which to address those challenges.
County-level road taxes produce a comparable pittance and few counties can afford to redirect general fund revenue to their road programs.
Cities, with denser populations, might be more able to deal with lost revenue from the state; but the reality is that they, too, couldn't easily replace the state-generated revenue that comes to them for their street budgets.
Pulling that money out from under the local governments would all but guarantee a political war among the different interests.
The result could be a showdown at the ballot box, if some new road tax is proposed, and more delay on resolving state or local funding needs.
There was one suggestion out of the meeting last week that might be worth pursuing.
That would be to take a closer look at how the cities and counties are actually using the money each receives.
State Rep. Andy Davis, R-Little Rock, questioned the transparency of the programs, which funnel millions of dollars to cities and counties each year.
Knowing more about how the money is used by cities and counties would serve good purpose.
It would illustrate whether -- or not --the investment of shared dollars is paying off.
Most likely, the answers will vary from city to city and from county to county. Each has its own set of challenges to meet, after all.
Still, such an inquiry most likely would shore up the practice of sharing revenue.
Meanwhile, the working group, which plans to meet every two weeks until its Dec. 15 deadline to report to the governor, is wisely focusing on short-term highway funding needs.
With the U.S. Congress still funding the nation's infrastructure needs by fits and spurts, the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department is looking for about $110 million in new money to fund an overlay program at a cost of about $200,000 a mile compared to the $1.5 million-a-mile cost for reconstruction.
The paving program would lengthen the life of existing roads and apparently allow highway officials to match all the federal money they can expect in the near future.
Unfortunately, grander goals seem out of reach in the current environment.
Commentary on 08/23/2015