Is highway funding east vs. west?
Published 12:00 am Wednesday, December 2, 2009
By Mark Wineka
Salisbury Post
Local legislators would like everyone to know they’re not living under a rock.
They realize that Interstate 85 north of Spencer will soon be eight lanes of highway choking down to four.
And they know that funds for widening the next section of I-85, including the Yadkin River bridge, are not currently scheduled.
State Rep. Lorene Coates, D-Rowan, says she’s aware “they’re having wrecks all the time down there now.”
“We’ve got to find a way to fund this bridge and replace this bridge,” Coates said Tuesday at the Rowan County Chamber of Commerce’s legislative breakfast at the Holiday Inn.
The I-85 widening project that would include the bridge is part of the state’s seven-year Transportation Improvement Program for 2007-2013.
But there are currently no funds scheduled for the 6.8-mile, $189 million project, which would extend from north of Long Ferry Road in Rowan County to U.S. 29-52-70/I-85 Business in Davidson County.
Sen. Andrew Brock, R-Davie, introduced a bill in the past legislative session that sought funds so the I-85 section over the Yadkin River could be accomplished. It went nowhere.
“If something happens to that bridge,” Brock said Tuesday, “… you’re talking about shutting down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.”
Brock said the eight lanes funneling down to four creates “a major traffic hazard.”
Rep. Fred Steen, R-Rowan, said Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, was traveling toward Raleigh once with billionaire David Murdock and UNC System President Erskine Bowles in his car and barely avoided a terrible accident on the two-lane, northbound Yadkin River bridge.
Overall, the local legislators complained that the state’s equity formula for distributing highway funds is really an “inequity formula” giving most of the benefits to eastern North Carolina counties.
They supported the Chamber’s call for revising the funding formula for construction and basing it on “actual miles driven” when giving priorities to road projects.
“That’s something all three of us are willing to fight for,” Steen said.
Steen warned the fight would amount to an east-vs.-west confrontation or a metropolitan-vs.-rural battle.
Brock said less populous northeastern counties receive six to nine times more highway funds than Rowan and Cabarrus counties, respectively.
He called the equity formula “fuzzy math” that ends up sending more money to eastern counties where many of the state leaders live.
Coates noted that the governor, lieutenant governor, Senate leader and secretary of transportation all hail from eastern counties. She also described U.S. 70 and U.S. 64 in eastern North Carolina as being good roads with “not a lot of traffic.”
Coates said one problem for the Department of Transportation is that paying for the I-85 section over the Yadkin River would rob many of the district’s other highway needs for the next seven years.
Asked by a Chamber member how the public could move the county’s highway agenda forward, Brock advised the business audience to contact other legislators and get them behind changing the funding formula.
“Put the heat on them,” Brock said.
Brock and Steen said the federal money allocated for road construction in North Carolina should be separated and not figured into the equity formula. The federal money should be divided “per federal mile” in each county, Brock said.
It would lead to Rowan’s receiving a lot more highway funds, he said. Steen added that all counties with interstates going through them — including I-40 in the west and I-95 in the east — would be treated more fairly.
The legislators also spoke of a similar eight-lanes-to-four-lanes problem south of China Grove and extending well into Cabarrus County. Again, Coates said, that section is “way down the line” to being funded.
Someone noted that it leads to and from North Carolina’s largest tourist attraction, Concord Mills. (The DOT’s current TIP calls for some I-85 widening between Speedway Boulevard and N.C. 73.
The trio of legislators, who return to Raleigh Jan. 24, covered many other issues Tuesday. Education received some attention.
A person from the audience — saying parents are frustrated with the results they’re getting in public schools — asked the legislators if they could change one thing that would make a difference in schools, what would it be?
Coates said she would want parents, students and school systems — in that order — to show more responsibility in the education process.
“How do you change parents?” she asked, “and I think that’s a question for our whole society.”
Parents today always think they’re children are right, when it used to be that teachers were always right, Coates said.
Schools have to have better discipline and from his experience, Brock said, teachers aren’t getting the support they need from administrators.
“We have the best society in the world, and we’re letting it slip away,” because of the lack of discipline in schools, Brock warned. He said everyone involved has to “quit sugar-coating the numbers and trying to be nice.”
Steen said the state and country as a whole made a big mistake in having the federal government involved in the education system through the No Child Left Behind program.
Is the federal government’s 7 percent funding for schools worth it, Steen asked.
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Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263, or mwineka@salisburypost.com.
