Road maintenance, funding should be local option

There must be something in the water. Even when state officials start talking about turning responsibility for local matters over to local governments, they can't seem to wrap their minds around the concept of actually relinquishing control over those matters.

The latest example comes from the Department of Transportation, whose commissioners want to find a way to hand responsibility to counties and municipalities for dirt roads, parking lots, subdivision roads and short roads that lead to individual homes or buildings - about 10 percent of the state system.

Shedding responsibility for local roads is a long-overdue idea, although we see no reason that any level of government should be responsible for parking lots and what are essentially driveways. Our state's tradition of controlling practically everything from Columbia has created the fourth-largest state-maintained highway system in the nation. ...

Some roads fall into the same category as education: They're important to our entire state, not just to the local community. But if they aren't state priorities, then the roads and the responsibility for maintaining them need to be turned over to local governments - along with the authority to raise whatever amount of money the local communities are willing to put into their upkeep.

The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News