Greene County calls for local agencies to receive fair share of state road fund

By Gary Scott on November 26, 2016 at 9:45am

Greene County’s transportation department is pushing for a fair share of Illinois’ highway road fund.

WLDS-WEAI News caught up with Greene County engineer David Marth, who says local transportation agencies are being shorted when it comes to how much of the state’s road fund they receive.

“The local agencies carry forty percent of the traffic in the state of Illinois, the local agencies have eighty-eight percent of the public road mileage in Illinois, and we only get twenty-one percent of the highway road fund. So we’re trying to get the lowest possible equitable share as designated by Transportation for Illinois Coalition, which is a multi-faceted transportation organization, they even see that the local agencies fair share of the road fund is forty percent, not twenty percent,” says Marth.

With Greene County passing a resolution last week, Marth breaks down what that means for the local area and the rest of Illinois.

“It is basically an advisory resolution trying to make the Speaker of the House, the Governor, the President of the Illinois Senate and the various other Illinois dignitaries aware that the locals are not getting their fair share of the road fund revenue. And now that the anti-diversionary law passed overwhelmingly, essentially for all intents and purposes, there is twenty-two percent of the road fund essentially up for debate where it goes,” Marth explains.

According to Marth, a number of other counties have passed resolutions, including Champaign, Tazewell, Peoria and others.

Marth is asking municipal boards to follow suit. He believes if “enough opinion is voiced at the local level” about wanting “a representative share of the road fund revenue,” it could go a long way towards influencing Illinois’ legislators.