Editorial: Highway leaders take wrong turn with road abandonment idea

Highway leaders take wrong turn for future

Imagine if your local sheriff's office, straining to make ends meet under its taxpayer-supported annual budget, simply carved out a part of the county and declared it would no longer patrol or enforce the laws there.

Think of the ramifications if a city water department had expanded over the years only to suddenly struggle to break even, so it simply turned off the flow of water to a segment of its customers and told them to make other arrangements.

What’s the point?

The idea to allow the Arkansas Highway Commission to eliminate small or low-use roads from the state’s highway system may have some merit, but House Bill 1781 is a shortcut to a long-term fix that doesn’t provide enough answers.

Do either of those responses make sense?

State Rep. Prissy Hickerson believes they do. She's a lawmaker from Texarkana, but more importantly, a former member of the Arkansas Highway Commission. She's familiar with the challenges faced by the quasi-independent state agency. With a budget largely supported by taxes on motor vehicle fuels, the agency's wallet is getting smaller when the prices for highway maintenance and construction are getting bigger. That's particularly bad news when one considers Arkansas' 16,000-mile highway system is the 12 largest in the nation.

What we have here is an agency that could handle the workload for decades because fuel taxes grew with the nation's fascination with automobiles and road travel. It had the resources to handle roads all over Arkansas. But no more. And the Highway Department's pleas for more funding from other sources have not been rewarded by state lawmakers who have other parts of government -- ones without their own dedicated source of funding -- to be concerned about.

So what does Hickerson suggest? Her House Bill 1781 attacks the problem simply: If the funding to maintain 16,000 miles of roads isn't there, why not just drop a few thousand miles from the Highway Department's obligations? The bill would authorize the independent Highway Commission to eliminate from the state highway system those state highways that (1) terminate on one end without connection to another state highway; or (2) that have an average daily traffic count of less than 2,000 vehicles and are used primarily for local traffic.

What's to become of these roads? The bill doesn't address that, but representatives of the state's 75 counties know how it's likely to work. If the state abandons a road, who's left to get the complaints about maintenance? That's the county road departments.

"It would essentially drop several thousand miles of highways on counties to take care of," said Chris Villines, executive director of the Association of Arkansas Counties. "We don't have the financial wherewithal to take care of the roads we have now."

Hickerson's plan, which remains in committee in Little Rock, is a radical reaction to a problem that took decades to create. It represents poor planning by state leaders to address a very real problem -- the state's highway system is too big for the level of funding Arkansas puts toward it. But a unilateral decision to simply abandon thousands of miles of roads without a plan for how they'll be dealt with in the future? That's irresponsible.

As the people of Northwest Arkansas know well, it takes years of planning to develop a road project and see it through to construction. Let's not make it so quick and easy for the highway commission to drop roads from its inventory. Arkansas' highway officials and state lawmakers to seriously study the best approach to reducing the burden on the agency. They must determine what can be done without unduly shifting that burden to local governments. And they need to understand the long-term impacts to residents and others who use the roads.

Prickerson acknowledged her bill was designed in part to "start the debate." And so it has. But the road to a solution is long and requires development of a plan -- a roadmap, if you will -- that ensure Arkansas gets to its destination without any unproductive detours.

Commentary on 03/26/2015

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