A bill to reduce the state's highway system would have serious ramifications for local governments.
Its passage doesn't seem all that likely, but its filing is worth noting.
The bill has been proposed by state Rep. Prissy Hickerson, R-Texarkana, a former state highway commissioner. She is carrying the bill on behalf of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, which would like to unload part of the 16,000-mile system the state must now maintain.
Just how many miles that might mean is not clear. The proposed law leaves that determination, within certain parameters, to the Arkansas Highway Commission.
Specifically, the commission could eliminate from the state highway system those state highways that terminate on one end without connection to another state highway or have an average daily traffic count of less than 2,000 motor vehicles and are used primarily for local traffic.
That sounds fairly limiting, but a spokesman for the agency put the number of miles the commission might eliminate at "several thousand."
That's not how many miles would be eliminated, just how many could be.
So what happens to those roads, if they are cut from the state system?
Responsibility for them would revert to local government.
Enter the Association of Arkansas Counties, via Chris Villines, executive director.
"It gives us grave concern," he said. "It would essentially drop several thousand miles of highways on counties to take care of. We don't have the financial wherewithal to take care of the roads we have now."
The truth is that some of the roads that the state might choose to eliminate from the state system probably should never have been accepted into it in the first place.
For others, the usage may have changed, possibly because of other road improvements nearby that altered traffic patterns.
There is, of course, another underlying reason for the state's interest in reducing its obligations.
Arkansas has an unusually large highway system, the 12th largest in the nation. Compare its size to the amount of state and federal funding Arkansas' system gets per mile and the ranking drops to 44th.
So, we're back to the argument that the state needs more money for highways, a point made again last week when highway officials delayed bid-letting on dozens of projects around the state.
Last week's announcement was actually the second round of Arkansas project suspensions, which now total an estimated $162 million for 61 different projects.
Officials specifically cited federal funding uncertainty, caused by the U.S. Congress' inaction on the Federal Highway Trust Fund; but highway officials have also been pushing for diversion of more state tax dollars to their use.
Clearly, the highway department must choose carefully where it spends the dollars it has these days.
Dumping responsibility for little-used state highways on counties would save the department some money -- probably not much in the big picture, but some.
Doing so would also push the problems down to the local governments.
As noted earlier, counties have trouble paying for roads, too, and are likely delaying even more maintenance on their expansive county road systems than the state does on its system.
Collectively, the counties maintain about 69,000 miles of county roads. That's more than four times as many miles as the state maintains. They are hardly the same kind of roads the state maintains; but their upkeep is still expensive to the local governments.
Remember, too, counties have some of the same stagnant revenue problems the state experiences. Part of the counties' road funding comes from the same fuel tax the state relies on.
Counties get 15 percent of the revenue, cities get 15 percent and the state gets 70 percent. If that tax revenue is flat for the state, it is flat for local governments, too.
Lawmakers will certainly hear that argument from the counties, if Hickerson's bill progresses.
The bill's chances are limited since it is still on the calendar of the House Public Transportation Committee. With time running out on the session, it might not get much further. Nor should it.
Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist and longtime journalist in Northwest Arkansas. Email her at [email protected].
Commentary on 03/29/2015