County Commission | The Magazine December 2018 | Page 9

FROM THE COVER
Inadequate Road and Bridge Funding:
Costly Consequences
Keep Adding Up
B
ad roads and bridges are
running up an expensive tab in
this state.
“Alabama’s transportation
infrastructure has not kept pace with
our population or our economy,”
said the Alabama Transportation
Institute’s Justice Smyth. “As a
result, it is costing us time, lives,
jobs, opportunity and money.”
While some consequences are
easier to see and put a number on
than others, taken together they
diminish quality of life, hinder
business activity and threaten
Alabama’s attractiveness to future
economic development prospects.
“The consensus from everyone is
that we cannot continue to maintain
our road and bridge system in a safe
condition, to promote economic
development, to provide safe
transportation for school buses, log
trucks, farmers and first responders
unless we have additional revenue,”
said Sonny Brasfield, Executive
Director of the Association of
County Commissions of Alabama.
The solution is additional
funding, which is easy to measure
in dollars and cents. However, “the
cost of ‘doing nothing’ is not zero,”
Smyth said.
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