A Review of Practices for Municipal Road Maintenance Construction Funding Allocation in the United States

The State of North Carolina General Assembly allocates over $145 million annually from the Highway Fund to the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) to distribute financial assistance to about 508 municipalities for road maintenance and construction. The funds designated for municipalities are distributed to maintain transportation infrastructure (resurfacing of existing streets; construction and maintenance of city streets, sidewalks, and greenways; and planning) within their corporate limits. Currently, the funds in NC are distributed to eligible municipalities by a formula that allocates 75% of the money based on municipality permanent population and 25% based on municipality street mileage. While all fifty Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the United States have a similar type of funding allocation for a similar purpose, each of them utilizes a different formula. The questions are: 1) What is the practice of 50 states for funding allocation for local streets maintenance and construction? 2) What factors do states consider when allocating funding and which are most commonly used? To answer those questions a comprehensive literature review on methods to allocate local street maintenance funding was conducted to obtain an assessment of the current practices of the fifty DOTs. In doing so, the factors being utilized in the distribution were identified. As a result, DOTs will be able to achieve a more equitable funding distribution for use in the construction of the United States municipal infrastructure.