NORTH CAROLINA — Inflation, population growth and infrastructure nearing the end of its life are pushing up the maintenance costs on the state’s highway system rapidly.
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On Tuesday the General Assembly’s joint committee that oversees transportation funding heard an overview of the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s biennial report on highway maintenance, dubbed the Maintenance Operations and Analysis Report (MOPAR).
The 55-page report boils down to this: The state’s roads are in decent condition, but keeping them that way will require a large boost in funding for the coming fiscal year and more modest increases each year for the foreseeable future.
The recommendation from the General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division is to increase maintenance funding by $611 million for the 2025 fiscal year and an additional $442 million in 2026, giving the department $3.29 billion at its disposal for maintenance that year. The biggest increase in that timeframe would be to the department’s bridge program, more-than doubling its budget from $330 to $673 million.
The report claims the maintenance budget will need to increase by more than 159% by 2030 to upkeep and gradually improve state roads.
Sean Hamel, a lead financial analyst with the General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division, was direct about the reasons: The National Highway Construction Cost Index saw 12% inflation in one year, North Carolina is the third-fastest-growing state and an increasing amount of infrastructure — bridges in particular — is aging beyond repair.
As it stands, the department places most of its routes in “good” condition, meaning they score at least an 80 out of 100 on its system that judges the condition of roadways based on a collection of national standards. About a third are fair and 2% are “poor,” meaning they scored less than 60.
Hamel told the committee the statewide score of 83 remains in the good range, but the state’s most-trafficked roads are deteriorating. He noted that between 2017 and 2023, the proportion of interstate routes in poor condition jumped from 4% to 8%. In the same time, the number of primary routes — non-interstate roads with limited access the department maintains — in poor condition climbed from 5% to 15%. Only small secondary roads saw improvements.
The report points the recommended funding increases as the best “bang for buck” route for maintenance funding and contrasts it with extreme examples. If the legislature leaves funding exactly the same for 10 years, road conditions will decline by 10 points. On the other end, if the state wrote a blank check for repairing roads, the score would increase by about 13 points, but the budget would pass the $6-billion mark in the next 10 years.
The one area the department has made steady gains is bridge maintenance. The state maintains 13,700 bridges, and over the past decade it has shrunk the percentage in “poor” condition from 14% to 8.4%, but the goal is to get that figure to 7% by 2030. About 5,000 bridges are more than 50 years old and are about to age out.
A large portion of NCDOT bridges are in the western part of the state, criss-crossing mountain streams and passing over rugged terrain. Hurricane Helene devastated infrastructure in that region and Hamel told the committee most of the “poor” structures are there. NCDOT estimates more than 800 of its bridges were damaged by the storm and at least 150 will need to be replaced.
A pitfall for the department’s goal to repair a number of small crossings in the western region could be expensive projects elsewhere. The department considers bridges with a replacement price tag more than $20 million “high value,” as they make up 1.5% of the state’s inventory but carry a $9.3 billion replacement cost, about 14% of what it would cost to rebuild every bridge in the state.
Some money is saved via preservation efforts that keep bridges in service longer. NCDOT awarded a $7.1-million contract last year to have the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge’s riding deck and associated stringers replaced, as part of a preservation project.
Still, Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, completed in 1969, fared poorly in NCDOT’s sufficiency ratings along with several others in New Hanover County. It scored a 43.56 this year and is listed as “functionally obsolete.” Bridges with scores below 50 can receive federal money to help bring them up to par.
Its replacement is looming and the latest estimate for a 135-foot design is $1.1 billion. If that estimate holds true, it would be the most expensive bridge project in North Carolina history by far.
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Hamel also discussed a way to put $10 million back into the maintenance coffers. NCDOT currently charges no fees for traffic impact analysis, encroachment reviews or services for subdivisions like reviewing road addition plans. It costs $50 for a driveway permit. These services all cost the department anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars to perform and come straight from the maintenance budget.
“These are funds that are no longer available to perform those maintenance activities,” Hamel said, adding driveway permits and encroachments make up the bulk of reviews.
The legislature would have to modify the fees or grant the state Board of Transportation authority to set fees.
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