The Road Less Traveled: State Officials Struggle With Managing Road Repairs

“I think we, without a doubt, have roads within the state that are in need of repair,” said Delegate Marty Gearheart, R-Mercer, chairman of the House Roads and Transportation Committee.

“Without a doubt, we have a backlog,” he said.

Ask a delegate or senator who represents Monongalia County, and they’ll tell you the roads around Morgantown are in desperate need of repair. The same thing goes for representatives from the northern or eastern panhandles.

Why, then, are West Virginia’s roads in such apparent disrepair? Why can’t more be done to fix the state’s roads and bridges?

The answer, as it usually does, comes down to money.

Makes the World Go ’Round

“Transportation infrastructure has been a challenge for all of West Virginia’s history,” said Brent Walker, communications director for the West Virginia Department of Transportation. “We’ve had to go around and through mountains.

“We do the best we can with what we have.”

According to Division of Highways spokeswoman Carrie Jones, West Virginia has thousands of miles of roads to maintain and more than 7,200 bridges. Of those bridges, almost 1,100 are structurally deficient — meaning they need repair — and another 1,400 spans are considered functionally obsolete.

The Department of Transportation budget line item for bridge repair and replacement comes to $15 million. The budget for paving and secondary road maintenance comes to $54 million. There’s another $100 million set aside for interstate construction.

Money for bridge and road maintenance and construction comes out of the Department of Transportation’s $1.2 billion budget appropriation. It seems like a lot of money, but Walker pointed out that in many parts of the state, rural secondary roads are the only means of getting from one place to another, so those roads take a lot of wear and tear.

“We rely on rural routes to get where we need to go,” he said.

Adding to the problem is a statewide revenue crisis that has seen lawmakers cut about $600 million from the overall state budget over the past several years. Faced with cuts, lawmakers have been unwilling or unable to put any extra money into roads for the past several legislative sessions.

Sen. Greg Boso, R-Nicholas, is chairman of the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. While he acknowledges the vital role roads and infrastructure play in economic development for the state, Boso concedes lawmakers haven’t been able to do much to come up with more money for road maintenance and repair.

“We’ve got limited funds,” he said.

Back to Basics

Officials in some states faced with similar budget constraints are dealing with the massive costs of road maintenance and repair by taking a giant step backward.

According to a January article by Sarah Breitenbach featured in The Huffington Post, The Pew Charitable Trusts and other outlets, officials in at least 27 states have converted about 550 miles of roads from pavement back to what essentially are dirt roads. Officials have either allowed the roads to deteriorate on their own or intentionally ground up the pavement and mixed it with gravel.

While the converted roads still require frequent maintenance, including grading and filling of holes, the cost can be cheaper than maintaining paved roads, Breitenbach found.

According to the article, officials in Allamakee County, Iowa, spent about $100,000 a mile in 2011 to resurface a typical paved road. But county officials found that getting rid of the pavement and putting down new gravel only cost about $5,000 a mile.

Officials in the city of Montpelier, Vermont, decided to grind up some of the Vermont capitol’s streets and convert them to gravel roads in 2009 as a way to save money, Breitenbach found. Although city officials have so far only converted about a mile of roadway, they believe converting roads will save Montpelier about half of what it would expect to pave and maintain roads over the next 20 years.

In other states, the decision on whether to pave or not to pave often comes down to the county or city level.

In West Virginia, the state took over the responsibility for maintaining county roads in the 1930s on the assumption that poor counties couldn’t compete with rich counties in building and maintaining infrastructure. But municipalities in the Mountain State are still responsible for the upkeep of their own streets and roadways.

In the city of Huntington, Public Works Director Jim Insco said the city maintains some gravel roadways almost by default.

Insco said Huntington has 192 miles of roads within city limits, but is responsible for maintaining an additional 226 miles of alleyways. Of those alleys, only 100 miles are paved, and the rest are gravel.

But Insco said city officials are trying to pave as many alleys as they can instead of leaving them unpaved.

Starting in 2015, Huntington officials began dedicating $1.6 million a year for paving projects. City officials have put off this year’s spring paving program because of a budget crisis, but intend to pick back up in the fall.

“Our focus has been on paving roads,” Insco said.

He said converting paved roads to gravel might make a certain amount of sense for parts of the state where a local road might not see a lot of traffic. But he believes gravel or dirt roads in heavily traveled urban areas would be a bad idea.

“Even if you have a dirt road, you have to maintain it,” he said. “That would be a step backward for the second-largest city in West Virginia.”

Walker said state highways officials have not had any serious discussions of converting any roads from pavement to dirt or gravel.

“At this point it’s not something we’d consider,” he said. “If we continue to be challenged with how we can preserve and maintain our system, and it continues to be something that we see nationwide, it might be something we’d discuss.”

New, Aggressive, Bold

Prior to Gov. Jim Justice’s State of the State address, Boso said he was eager to see what kind of plan Justice had in mind for improving the state’s roads and bridges. During his inaugural speech, Justice talked about a plan to create an infrastructure construction program totaling billions of dollars.

Saying he had been elected to come up with “new ideas,” “aggressive ideas” and “bold ideas,” Justice presented his roads plan Feb. 8.

Under the governor’s proposal, the licensing fee for motor vehicles would go from $30 to $50. Tolls on the West Virginia Turnpike would go from $2 to $3 per toll booth, and state residents would be asked to pay an additional 10 cents a gallon in gasoline taxes. The money raised would go to pay off a series of new road bonds.

Justice said the plan would require a constitutional amendment and a statewide vote to be able to sell the bonds. The plan would require legislative action to allow proceeds from Turnpike tolls to be used for roads other than the Turnpike.

Whether lawmakers will go along with the plan remains to be seen. Several Republican members of the House of Delegates and Senate balked at other aspects of Justice’s budget plan, which includes raising the state sales tax and charging a business activity tax, but proposes only about $26 million in budget cuts.