Say what? (News and Observer)
Submitted by eastwake on 02/10/2010 – 15:27
If insomnia is a problem for you, flip your television set to a rebroadcast of Monday night’s Wendell town board meeting, specifically the report on equity funding for transportation.
You’ll be asleep in minutes.
But here’s the issue. Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker believes Wake County – and by association his city and those in eastern Wake County – don’t get enough of the state’s transportation pie. He’s asking towns to support a resolution asking the state to rethink how they divide transportation dollars. Meeker argues that rural parts of the state (think Dare County) get a disproportionally large amount of money for the number of people who benefit.
Wendell Mayor Harold Broadwell won just such approval from the town board Monday night, but not until they heard a mind-numbing presentation on how the state splits up the money now.
Diane Wilson, a manager with CAMPO (another cute government acronym which means Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization), explained that funding sources all have various criteria for what they willl fund, and at what level. Some of the funding sources generate revenues based on rules passed nearly 90 years ago.
It may be a chicken-or-an-egg kind of question. If more roads bring more people, then why not build roads in areas where high growth would be welcome? On the other hand, if there are already a lot of people in one place (think Wake or Mecklenburg counties) then maybe the road money should be spent where the people already are.
It’s a difficult question to answer, but as the General Assembly gets more urban and suburban, and less rural, look for kinder receptions for such requests in the future.
