It is really something to think about that we have 159 counties in Georgia. That is, 159 counties, most with too small of population and too little resources to provide consistently unifom and standard road maintenence across all jurisdictions with wildly varying consistency and quality. These are 159 different counties with road agencies ranging from a fully staffed DOT to those lacking the essential equipment and personnel to make professional decisions. We also have those that do have those things that still provide substandard roads. This does not have to be this way.

159 counties...second only to Texas and more than any state of its size. In comparison, Alabama and Florida both have 67 counties. Arizona has only 12 and is twice the size of Georgia meaning that counties stretch hundreds of miles across. Obviously, Georgia has too many counties. Also, since there is no chance that any of these counties will merge and that there is already a push to add another county, movement should be considered to reduce the bureaucracy and waste that goes with so many governments for such small areas by finding a way to reduce the duplicate services in road maintenance.

We all know, too, about those areas in Georgia where little concern is given for the overall quality of the roads in the counties, instead becoming a game of favors with nothing pro-active, basically meaning that work too often is only done when enough people complain or somebody gets killed. It is in these places that little to no money is spent on making sure that quality roads are built and maintained, and these issues here can be reduced or eliminated by a number of different consolidation measures.

Truly, with the autonomy of local governments in this state and in much of the U.S., it is quite remarkable that there as many counties (and a few cities) in Georgia as there are now that actually are trying to do a decent job maintaining their own county roads, but what is noted in those counties is that there is a sizable enough population that the county operates a full engineering staff, properly equipped road department and is operated more professionally. The problem is, it takes a population of about 40,000 or more to have that. The vast majority of counties in Georgia are far under 40,000 people. In these more growing areas, the changes have been noted where poorly maintained roads suddenly were standardized and corrected, but was this expense really necessary? What if they had been managed correctly to start with?

Even in the professional counties, the cost is often too high with so much spent on administrative overhead that modernization and standardization still has not quite occurred. There are still very few counties that have state-quality road systems. Any jolt in the budget results in neglecting even basic maintenance work or cutting personnel to oversee the roads: usually the county engineer. As a result, every county is battling for the state-aid funding to accomplish what they cannot, and that is significant when you have so many counties.

THE FUTURE OF ROADS IS NOW

It is now the 21st Century, and it is truly sad that in parts of this country, including our state, we still have county agencies that build and maintain shoddy, substandard or infrequently maintained roads. While I am very much of a fan of a narrow, winding country road and keeping weight-restricted historic bridges open to traffic, I find it very troubling that routine operations such as proper and consistent signage, road striping, proper guardrail installation and maintenance, pothole patching and road construction methods are still allowed to be grossly substandard or incorrectly done with no recourse or oversight: especially on the major collector and arterial routes. The attitude is basically that unless the state is funding the project, anything goes.

It is as if today that county roads are still treated like they are truly "local" dirt roads that exist only for the farmer carrying collards to the market when in fact over 15% of the county roads in Georgia not only qualify as roads that could be state routes, but are built to those standards as well. Most of our major county roads are products of the road building and paving programs that existed from the 40's-70's, so they are essentially highways that just aren't maintained to highway levels. In fact, many of our secondary function state routes started out as those local dirt roads. Considering this, it is time to take action to make sure that at least those major roads, if not all of our local roads are consistently well-maintained regardless of jurisdiction.

COMPARING CONSOLIDATED ROAD SYSTEMS TO OURS

Georgia only has 15.6% of the roads under state control and is not only not interested in taking over more county roads, but has been eager to turn more back to the local government. In contrast with Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have no county roads, and they are both perfectly happy with this arrangement. While these county roads are not highways and maintained under a secondary system, many are to state highway levels. Even the poorest counties have well-built, very standardized roads with consistent maintenance. Not only that, but Virginia consistently ranks in the top 10 and North Carolina in the top 15 in road maintenance nationally. Both states have rugged mountains and marshy coastal terrain, colder winters and humongous secondary state highway systems, yet it seems you are more likely to hit a pothole on local roads in the Peach State than on secondary roads in either of those states. While Georgia has been ranked as having the best roads in the past, our roads are aging now from years of sprawl, poor funding for local roads and no standards for local road construction. It should also be noted that we also have far more unpaved roads than either North Carolina or Virginia.

Here is the scenario of driving on a local road in Georgia or a local road in pretty much any state with very little intergovernmental cooperation. You're in one of the counties or cities who has invested in building roads correctly, has decent warning signage and properly maintains the pavement markings. You then cross into another county or city and the road ahead is replaced with a faded out centerline; shoddy, incorrect or non-existant signage and the roadway is just plain dangerous either from bad pavement or bad geometry. Sometimes even the work is almost deliberately poor with strange and almost unreadable fonts on the road signs, center lines that look like they were painted by a child on a tantrum and non-standard, old guardrails with outdated or no anchors.

SEVERAL PLANS

While all these problems cannot all be alleviated with the system we have, things can be improved over time by taking any of these several measures. These include regional road agencies, agility agreements, maintenance contracts where every county maintains both state and local roads, maintenance contracts where GDOT performs routine maintenance operations for poorer counties (off-system maintenance) and even working out agreements with interested counties and cities across the state to allow GDOT to completely takeover the county roads within those counties or city streets within their cities.

Left off from this proposal is the proposal for the County Primary Highway System, because despite some similarities, it is not a comprehensive plan and is only meant to address the other 17% of collector and arterial routes not under state control. Thus, this is described on another page.

Here, however, I will describe each concept listed in the first paragraph, discussing briefly how they work, their benefits and their possible problems.

REGIONAL ROAD AGENCIES

It is not arguable that GDOT has resisted most attempts to assume control of existing roads on the local road system. Very few state roads have been added along county roads since the 1970's, and the state has been turning back more roads than they have added. This means that counties are not being helped any to reduce their load, and the problems described include major routes that are local in name only. I have had the experience in the past in talking to GDOT where they have balked and even been hostile at any suggestion to provide maintenance services to counties, do anything to improve these roads beyond LARP or even point out problems in the counties with the most substandard roads. While the new "Off-System Safety Improvement Program" is a start, it is often poorly managed and provides absolutely no assurance of better roads or proper long-term maintenance. What is fixed on it will end up decaying much like similar projects of the 1970's were in the 1990's.

Compared with the infrequent state-aid, counties themselves, once they improve their roads on their own, actually maintain to those standards consistently for years to come or ultimately improve, though the maintenance is often infrequent compared with the state highways. In any region, there is at least one or two counties that maintain to reasonably high standards and have a more professional organization for that purpose. These are usually the counties with the highest populations, but not always. Considering this, a worthwhile plan would be to create a pool of resources and push for the consolidate of county road agencies into a regional road system across the state for the sole purpose of road maintenance.

Perhaps, for example, several counties and cities in Northwestern Georgia could combine their county and city road departments into one large highway agency responsible for the routine maintenance of the roads in all counties within the region. This would not diminish local power, but it would mean that the same high standards applied in counties such as Paulding or Gwinnett would apply to all counties in the region, and the larger oversight and cooperation would result in better consistency of the roads in the region. This is because all of the counties involved would have to agree to maintain to certain uniform standards, offer a larger pool of ideas, have adequate resources for better equipment and be able to fund an engineer or engineering department. The cost benefits would be completely substantial, and the purchasing power would increase greatly as well. This could also reduce taxes by requiring less overhead and fewer departments. However, the rules need to be changed that allow cities and counties to share these services indefinitely and for cities not to be penalized in their charter by sharing services if they wish to.

My suggestion in this is that no less than 15 and no more than 60 maintenance districts be created out of the 159 counties and that every county be required to be part of such a district if there is enough support for the program. The purpose for this program would not be regional governance, and the regional highway agencies would only be responsible for routine maintenance and construction work of the roads meaning that all road projects not deemed as maintenance work would be administered through each county. It is suggested that regional road agencies are required to maintain all roads to full GDOT standards and that cooperation between the agencies exists where it currently does not.

I believe that this could be a very beneficial operation, but my fear in such a system is the political conflict would make the structure very unstable. This is why I did not recommend regional DOT's, and instead only suggested these exist for maintenance purposes. While I feel it would be best just to have GDOT work to consolidate on this level, I feel that the opposition from GDOT of assuming any additional responsibilities could be possibly better addressed from a regional coalition of counties and cities.

AGILITY AGREEMENTS

Agility agreements are essentially the seldom-used act of sharing services between a higher and lower agency without any jurisdictional shift or any one agency being responsible for all roads within a particular jurisdiction. An agility agreement program in Georgia would be based directly on Pennsylvania's program for their township roads there. How it basically works is that a county or city offers to provide services where they are strongest to GDOT where in turn the state provides other services where they are strongest back for the counties. The cost savings promote more money spent on maintenance, because it eliminates duplicate services.

The trick to making it work in Pennsylvania is that with those cost savings, PennDOT requires the townships (there is only one active county road agency in Pennsylvania) to maintain their roads to PennDOT standards. This means that without any jurisdictional shift, loss of jobs or erosion of local authority, the state is able to bring a more efficient operation, state highway standards and better routine maintenance to their local roads at an equal or reduced cost. Agility agreements are on a participation-only basis and have been used there since 1997.

This is a worthy and reasonable proposal that would reduce the amount of paperwork and require the least complications, though its effectiveness would be limited only to those counties and cities willing to participate. While similar to the proposal below, this is the only proposal where higher standards can be acheived without any change in the structure of state or local highway agencies to make it possible.

I have personally seen the results of the agility program when traveling through the state in 2000, and noted that in many of the townships, they appeared to be PennDOT quality roads yet were not part of either the primary or secondary highway system. It was a couple years later that I learned of the program and found information about it.

COUNTY AGENCIES CONSOLIDATING WITH GDOT TO MAINTAIN BOTH STATE AND COUNTY ROADS

I just discussed the Pennsylvania approach, and now I will discuss the Wisconsin approach. In the early 20th century in Wisconsin, a movement occured which created much stronger county road departments statewide by eliminating all maintenance operations of the state highway department. The result was that each respective county was not only given charge of their own county roads, but also of the state trunkline system. By doing this, the state effectively cut the maintenance operations in half and created much stronger county highway agencies better capable of maintaining decent quality roads. WisDOT ultimately became an organization that oversaw the state trunklines instead of actually maintaining them and they control a smaller ratio of state routes than Georgia. With state standards required of the counties on both networks, the whole state has a very consistently maintained road network that is very similar to a primary and secondary state highway system. While Wisconsin counties do not maintain all roads within the county (they have township governments), the state and county trunkline systems are some of the best roads in the midwest, and Wisconsin sees no need to change the structure.

While this approach seems outlandish here in the South, it could work if GDOT required state standards applied on all roads in the state and were able to work with counties on an advisory basis. Without having both a state and county highway department in each county doing the same work on different roads, running different departments and purchasing duplicate equipment, this would greatly increase the efficiency of Georgia's roads as well as improving the maintenance throughout. It is an ideal approach in the very anti-big government South because it does not diminish local authority over the roads.

The only problem is that even though the quality of the roads would likely improve quickly, most of the cost savings would not be realized initially, and labor issues would have to resolved by grandfathering existing employees in their positions and with the agency they are currently working for. What would be realized right away is higher quality roads. In all, it is still a reasonable and politically sound approach, and outweighs either of the previously two described approaches in overall effectiveness.

STATE MAINTENANCE OF COUNTY ROADS OFF THE STATE ROUTE SYSTEM

I have never understood the vehement opposition to state agencies performing maintenance work on county roads. The state is not doing the work for free! The state, of course, requires that the counties give up local funding for these roads, requiring a chunk of county taxes. This was something I tried to champion a decade ago, and the response was never positive. Yes, I know GDOT has its flaws. Yes, I know they have 18,500 miles of roads. Texas has 78,000 miles. North Carolina has 80,000. Texas and North Carolina have lots of multi-lane roads just like Georgia. Texas and North Carolina maintain a large ratio of roads than Georgia (though North Carolina's state primary system matches ours in size). I just do not really see their point. Texas is ranked in the top five states for best roads in the country, and North Carolina consistently ranks in the Top 20.

Here are the facts. Of the 159 counties in Georgia, the majority are poor counties with too low of tax revenues to afford to both have their own road systems and maintain them at an adequate level of consistency and quality. If it wasn't for the LARP program, the state-driven county highway building programs of the mid-20th century and years of strong rural influence in the capitol, they would be much worse. These counties are also at a disadvantage to compete with the more influential counties in state-aid programs to help them with other needs.

If we are going to have consistent and quality maintenance on all of our roads statewide, perhaps the counties should have the option of allowing the state to provide services to those counties in lieu of running a road department. If anything, it is maintenance they need help on. I know for a fact that most of the rural counties in Georgia do not have any engineering service at all, yet the state has an engineer for the same area that does not work on the roads in those counties.

The solution is this simple in this case: either allow the counties to pay the state a set amount each year to maintain their roads or in some cases, or let the counties (again, or cities) relinquish the responsibility for their road systems to GDOT if they wish to do so. In the former, the state will agree to use the funds the counties allot for road maintenance, having the state do the work with county funding with the agreements set in 5-10 year contracts. In the latter, the state will require the counties to turn over a portion of the property tax revenues and all gas tax revenues to fund construction and maintenance on the county roads for a minimum contract time of 10 years. The counties may also continue to use their local sales taxes directly to improve the roads having the state perform the work but not be required to turn over revenues to the state for that purpose.

None of this has to be absolute or comprehensive statewide, and no counties should be required to participate. Allowing the state to oversee or control roads will not bring top-notch roads, but what it will do is allow the poorer areas of the state (or any locality that wishes to do so) to have the best quality roads that money will allow.

SUMMARY

While roads in Georgia are far better than they were even 10 or 20 years ago, our local system is still behind because of the poor quality design of the roads not built by the state and poor maintenance of the roads, which has begun to improve in the past 10 years. However, there is still much work needed, and that is to create a consistently high quality road system off of the state highway system.

Georgia has too many small jurisdictions, and this is part of the problem. I believe that increasing cooperation between agencies and reducing the overhead that Georgia will truly have the best all-around road system that will be safer and cheaper to maintain than what we have now.

This can only be accomplished as a whole through various shared services or consolidation measures to promote efficiency. I have discussed all of these here, and have suggested time-tested methods. While often not politically favorable, these have always resulted in higher standard, better quality roads that ultimately cost equally or less to maintain than the current structure we have right now.