As a follow up to yesterday's post about Blount County Mayor Jerry Cunningham's proposal for a wheel tax, I contacted Blount County Highway Department Superintendent Bill Dunlap to ask for some specifics about projects Mayor Cunningham mentioned in the newspaper article. Mr. Dunlap promptly replied with the following info:

[The number one project] is Morganton road, the traffic count on it is near 8000 cars per day. Old Niles Ferry would be the second based on traffic count.

In 2000 we did a needs study on Blount county's road system and came up with at that time 25 million dollars worth of work that needed to be done.

Mr. Dunlap offered to meet with me to go over the study and discuss how they identified project needs.

Both roads mentioned are definitely in need of improvement. There has been a lot of growth in both those areas. The question then becomes, how did all that development get approved without addressing the need for road improvements? Adequate facilities taxes or impact fees would be one way to fund it as opposed to a more regressive wheel tax, but Bill Lyons noted in comments on the previous post that such impact fees are now apparently illegal in Tennessee.

Anyway, Blount County makes a good case for raising the $1 million that would result in $4 million in matching Free Federal Funding™. (And perhaps it would be helpful for Mayor Cunningham to provide more specifics such as this to make his case). Whether a wheel tax is the best way to do that is still an open question, but I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe SayUncle can take his red sharpie over to the Mayor's office and find the money somewhere else.