(The Center Square) – Raleigh and Charlotte are soaking up a disproportionate share of North Carolina’s road construction funds, leaving other fast-growing parts of the state behind, legislators said Thursday at a committee meeting in the House of Representatives.
Counties in the eastern and western parts of the state “are not getting projects, even though their growth is exploding,” Rep. John Torbett, a Republican from Gaston County, said at a meeting of the the Select Committee on North Carolina’s Transportation Future.
“It’s been – at least from a legislative perspective, 13 years since we’ve heard about how growth has impacted our transportation needs around the state,” the legislator said. “What I’m hearing is that it’s time for a full and comprehensive study to show how growth has impacted and is currently impacted the state.”
There are more transportation projects needed than there are funds for many of them, Torbett said.
“Needless to say, if we had the funds to accommodate, we probably wouldn’t be having this committee,” he said. “We’d be moving at light speed down the road.”
Parts of eastern North Carolina are “busting at the seams,“ said Chairman Phil Shepard, R-Onslow.
“Our population in Onslaw County has increased[ 20,000 since last year due to the military moving MARSOC from San Diego,” Shepard said. “So we are already behind the eight ball.”
MARSOC is the acronym for Marine Forces Special Operations Command.
Shepard said the state criteria for road project funding as currently written, “Doesn’t leave much hope for those of us in that particular area of southeastern North Carolina where the population is really booming.”
Legislators represent not only their particular districts but the entire state, Rep. Marita Cervania, D-Wake, told the committee.
“In my office, I say we represent everyone,” she said. “I do actually have constituents who either retire to the East but still think I’m their representative and we have people who have homes in both. So know that even though we have major pain points in Raleigh and Wake County, I want to get solutions in eastern, western, every part of the state.”
State Rep. Zach Hawkins, D-Durham, said the area he represents approved 18,000 new homes over a four-year-period in East Durham.
“For almost the first two decades I lived in Durham, it was small roads and we only had one middle school,” he said. “For no one to think about the need for infrastructure on this side of town was just shortsighted. It is a traffic jam.”
He agreed that the eastern part of the state needs better roads.
“We have more and more people coming to the state,” said Hawkins.
