Wisconsin Towns Association director Mike Koles had a clear message as he sat before a panel of lawmakers recently: America’s rural roads, bridges and culverts are deteriorating.
Approximately 12% of the nation’s arterials and collectors — terms the Transportation Department uses to classify rural freeways, highways, local roads and streets — were rated in poor condition in 2020, while 19% were in mediocre condition and 17% in fair condition, Koles said. Only 51% were classified as “good.”
But Koles, a past president of the National Association of Towns and Townships Rural, added that these statistics only cover about 31% of rural roads. Another 67% are classified as “local roads,” a label that makes it more difficult to tell what condition they are in nationwide. In Wisconsin, at least 76% of these local roads “require significant maintenance and reconstruction,” and 11% are in “poor condition,” Koles said in his written testimony.
Koles likened the nation’s road system to the human circulatory system. The interstate system is the heart of that system, state highways are arteries and veins and local roads are the capillaries.
“An athlete cannot succeed if they have a strong heart and weak capillaries,” he told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week. “I’m telling you, the rural areas in our system have those capillaries, and they are weak. We have a sickness and that hinders our economy.”
American Farm Bureau Federation Vice President Scott VanderWal echoed that sentiment in response to a question from Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif. He noted that local governments, particularly in his home state of South Dakota, have struggled to keep up with the costs of repairing local roads amid inflation and heightened contractor costs.
“If you think about it, every road we have is crucial, even a township road that has gravel on it,” VanderWal said. “In South Dakota, there’s a tremendous number of those. But to the people that farm beside those roads, they’re hugely important, because that’s how they get their products to market.”
According to Koles, bridges are in a similar situation. Some 70% of the nation’s 618,000 bridges are rural. Eight percent of these were rated as poor or structurally deficient in 2022, which usually means they are “not feasible” for agriculture or forestry equipment to use, he added.
Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Ore., said two of the counties she represents — Lane and Douglas — have around 700 bridges in “dire need of repair or replacement.” Most of these, she added, were built in the 1950s and '60s.
The challenge extends to culverts, too, Koles said. Bridges are defined as extending 20 feet or more, while culverts span less than 20 feet. But culverts are not regularly inspected like bridges or even inventoried by government agencies, he said.
“Culverts act a lot like bridges and yet, on the local system in this country, we don’t know where they are, we don’t know how many there are, and we have no idea what the safety condition is on them,” he said.
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Culverts can pose similar risks to degrading bridges, despite being shorter in length, Koles said. He pointed to a situation in Farmington, Wisconsin, last spring, when a 15-foot-by-five-inch culvert collapsed after a 20-ton fertilizer truck drove over it. The culvert was later found to have been built at some point prior to 1916, according to his testimony.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who represents the district where the incident took place, said repairing the culvert has cost the town about $400,000, which he said is “a lot of money when you talk about Farmington.”
“People don’t understand [Farmington is] responsible for maintaining all of their roads and to apply essentially four years' worth of their budget out to fix a single culvert — I’m just not OK with that,” Van Orden said.
Koles urged lawmakers to create a “stable, consistent, and enhanced funding stream” for roads and bridges. While he called the $305 billion Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act and the $1.2 billion Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act a “welcome and necessary injection” of funds, he said a more stable funding stream would allow local governments to better plan for infrastructure improvements. He also suggested lawmakers expand bridge programs in the FAST Act and IIJA, while also creating a “carve-out” that includes non-state structures less than 20 feet.
VanderWal suggested increasing fuel taxes that go into the highway trust fund. The fund currently “faces significant challenges, including insufficient funding and outdated infrastructure,” and, according to the CBO, faces a potential shortfall of $149.7 billion in the five fiscal years after the IIJA expires.
His testimony noted that tax increases would "reflect improvements in fuel economy and increased inflation. We also support revenue collection efforts to those users whose vehicles do not contribute to the Federal Highway Fund (electric vehicles)."
VanderWal’s written testimony also calls for “improving and expanding” inland waterway infrastructure, which he says can help alleviate road congestion and prevent highway deterioration.
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