ARC giveth, NC taketh away

Western NC counties believe they’re getting the shaft on road funds

By Frank Bradley
Sentinel writer

If it were real estate money, they would call it illegally commingling funds. But since it’s road money, there’s no name for it. It’s just the way the General Legislature with the help of North Carolina’s Department of Transportation (DOT) mixes up some special regional funds that are supposed to go to our mountain counties and siphons them off for the other counties all across the state.
Here’s what is happening. More than forty years ago the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) reported to Congress that the economic growth in Appalachia would not be possible until the Region’s isolation had been overcome.
At that time, Congress authorized the construction of the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) to build better roads here to connect Appalachia to the nation’s interstate system, recognizing that it cost much more money to build roads in the mountains than in the flat part of the country. So while it was providing our region with additional funds to build better roads, the feds sent the money to the state capital’s to administer. While we don’t know how other states managed the dollars, we do know that in North Carolina, the legislature and the DOT threw these funds in the same pot with other highway funds generated by the gasoline tax and then divided all the money up equally between the district according to some esoteric formula. The long and short of it is, the mountain counties didn’t get extra boost to create better roads here, since it was spread out among all the districts throughout the state.
Recently, some of our state representatives have wised up and are asking why this poaching of highway funds has taken place. Why the spreading of funds designated for the mountain counties to other counties in the state for road work is in fact violating the spirit and intent of the ADHS legislation.
On Monday, Cherokee County and the Town of Murphy passed resolutions requesting the United States Congress to exclude the ADHS funding from the minimum return of transportation funding to the State of North Carolina. And it asks the North Carolina General Assembly also to exclude this ADHS funding from the North Carolina equity formula in order to complete the remaining corridors to benefit the people of Southern Appalachia and Southwestern North Carolina.
In other actions at the Cherokee County regular commission meeting, the board approved the appointment of T.L. McNabb and Ernest Jones to serve on the county’s Farmland Preservation Advisory Board for three year terms.
The board also approved a  change to its transit policy stating that the county does not use its vans for charter services.