The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, frustrated in finding new revenue for road maintenance earlier in the session of the Arkansas Legislature, now wants authority to shed little-used highways from the 16,000-mile system because without new money, it says, it no longer can afford to maintain all the roads.
House Bill 1781 by Rep. Prissy Hickerson, R-Texarkana, would allow the agency to eliminate highways from the system that terminate on one end without connection to another state highway or have an average daily traffic of fewer than 2,000 vehicles and are principally used for local traffic.
A top department official, Randy Ort, said the agency didn’t have an exact mileage of the highways that would qualify, but he estimated the total mileage that would be eligible to be considered for elimination if the bill became law would amount to “several thousand.”
The system is the 12th-largest in the nation, amounts to about 16 percent of all public roads in the state and carries about 76 percent of the state’s traffic. Highway officials also routinely point out the state’s combined federal and state funding per mile ranks 44th.
Legislators have repeatedly suggested the system is too large, Ort said. “We get asked all the time, ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ Well, this [bill] gives them a chance to debate it.”
But the bill has alarmed the Association of Arkansas Counties. The state’s 75 counties already are responsible for maintaining nearly 69,000 miles of county roads though they carry less than 10 percent of total traffic. County officials fear they will be responsible for maintaining the roads the department discards.
“It gives us grave concern,” said Chris Villines, the association’s executive director. “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 counties generally receive 15 percent of every state dollar devoted to roads with cities receiving an equal 15 percent and the state receiving the balance.
Hickerson’s bill doesn’t specify who would be responsible for the maintenance of any highways the Highway Department sheds.
“Would they be a county road or a road in a county?” Ort said. “I don’t know.”
But Villines said that for all practical purposes, they would be county roads. “There would be some level of expectation that these roads would be maintained” by the counties, he said.
Several years ago, the Highway Department began apportioning much of its resources to about 8,000 miles of highway under a grouping it called the Arkansas Primary Highway Network. It is so named because, although it accounts for half the highway system, it carries about 90 percent of the traffic.
Ort said he knew of no other similar effort in Arkansas in “modern times” to systematically reduce the highway system that falls under the department’s responsibility. But the subject has been broached in the recent past.
The Blue Ribbon Committee on Highway Finance’s 2010 report, which concluded that the existing way of funding highways in Arkansas was unsustainable, recommended, among other things, a study on shrinking the system and that a cap on state mileage should be proposed to reduce the mileage to its “strategic core.”
“The purpose of the state highway system is to connect the state — both destinations within the state and the state with the nation,” the report said. “It is not to move people around within those destinations.
“However, the gradual accretion of old state highways within cities that now function as urban arterial roadways and low-volume rural highways burden the state highway system to such a degree that it does not have the resources to make needed strategic investments.”
Until now, the Highway Department has sought out additional revenue. Traditional revenue, primarily fuel taxes, hasn’t kept up with demands on the system, officials said. More fuel-efficient vehicles allow them to go farther on less fuel, leaving the department with roads that continue to wear out but with less money to fix them.
Two other voter-approved initiatives totaling $3 billion
— one to repair interstates and another to widen key highways — are stopgap measures that state highway officials say don’t address the long-term structural weakness of highway funding.
Earlier in this legislative session, highway officials pushed for a measure that would have shifted $2.8 billion in general revenue over 10 years to highways.
The proposal drew opposition from education and social-service interests that rely on general revenue.
Only a portion of money that is over and above funds generated in the previous year would have been shifted to highways, proponents said. Thus, they said, the base general revenue being collected now would be preserved, and general-revenue growth would be available to other agencies and providers.
Under the proposal, the traditional split of highway money would be used with 70 percent going to the Highway Department and the remainder divided evenly between city and county road departments.
Counties didn’t support the bill, citing concerns with language governing how revenue from the severance tax on natural gas would be spent. Some counties in the Fayetteville Shale production area rely on a portion of that revenue.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson persuaded the sponsor to withdraw the bill. The governor said he would form a working group to develop recommendations on long-term highway funding.
In an interview last week, Hickerson said she planned to present the bill at Tuesday’s meeting of the House Public Transportation Committee, but she said she was unsure of what would happen after that, suggesting the bill would serve as a way to “start the debate.” Hickerson is the committee chairman and a former member of the Arkansas Highway Commission.
Some of the roads in the state highway system used to be county roads. Until the early 1970s, counties periodically were allowed to turn over a certain portion of their roads to the department, Ort said.
That practice may have been responsible for highways such as Arkansas 221. It goes out of Berryville in Carroll County southwest to the Madison County line. In continues in Madison County as a county road. It carries about 1,100 vehicles daily, according to department statistics.
Several state highways in eastern Arkansas terminate at the Mississippi River. Arkansas 120, for instance, goes about 8 miles east from U.S. 61 and ends at the Mississippi County community of O’Donnell Bend just shy of the river. It carries about 250 vehicles a day.
“There’s all kinds of things like that that make no sense,” Ort said.