What About Yuma? State Taking Milllions of Dollars from Yuma Roads
One of the biggest complaints Yuma residents have about the city is the wear and tear in the roads. Potholes, cracks and bumps occur on multiple street through out the county.
The Yuma City Manager Greg Wilkinson says the Arizona Legislature is to blame for Yuma’s current state of roads. Saying lawmakers are taking millions of dollars from the fund used to repair state roads. “Over the last ten to twelve years they have been sweeping anywhere between 100 to 200 million and been using it to supplement the state general fund instead of distributing out to the cities and the counties,” says Wilkinson.
The fund is called the Highway User Revenue Fund or HURF. The money for the fund is generated by gas tax, vehicle registration fees and more. The money is collected by cities and counties and put into a complicated distribution chart, that mostly distributes the money based on population. After the funds flow through the formula, the Arizona Department of Transportation allocates the money and the Arizona Treasurer distributes the funds like a bank according to Arizona Department of Transportation assistant communications manager Steve Elliot. Representatives say HURF is worth more than a billion dollars.
However, Yuma has not been getting it’s fair share from legislators. Wilkinson says “What’s happened now is the state has gone back on its agreement and is not distributing the funds as per agreement between the state cities and counties.”
The “sweeps”, as they are called started increasing after the 2008 financial crisis. The state was taking $60 million or more out of the HURF. Representative Don Shooter says it’s been used to compensate the general budget. Also, going to large population counties like Maricopa and Pima. “What we call it in Yuma is stealing, robbing Peter to pay Paul,” says Shooter.
Representative Charlene Fernandez says some of the money that goes into the HURF is also going to pay Arizona Department of Public Safety officers. “By all means, we should be funding their department, but now we are funding them totally at the expense of what we should be giving to our towns and cities,” says Fernandez.
For every $80 to $90 million the legislature takes from the HURF fund, it shorts Yuma about a million dollars. That means for the last 12 years, lawmakers have taken nearly $25 million form the city of Yuma. According to the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, that amount of money could repair nearly 1,700 miles worth of two lane roads. That amount of money could repair a road length if 4th avenue, about 420 times.
The City says there is nothing they can do about the swept money. Wilkinson says legal action against the state is not an option, “The issue is that what the legislature does is that they change the law, they redistribute and they change it back. That’s kind of the process they go, the legislature can change the laws and make laws so they can change it so there is not really an opportunity to take legal action.”
Even if the city did get the $25 million owed to them, the city says there are $100 million worth of road repairs to do in the city. Wilkinson the situation has city officials frustrated. “I mean we have gone up to the state every year. We’ve had to process where almost the entire council goes up there and sits down and talks with these state. Each year they say they will try and they will try to get the funds back.” After years of trying, local representatives were able to do just that. While discussing the 2017-2018 State Budget, lawmakers were able to fully fund the HURF appropriation. Which Shooter says should decrease the sweeps.
This is the first time in years counties and cities will get the full distribution from the legislature. When discussing the state budget for the 2017-2018 fiscal year, lawmakers allocated $120 million for local street and highway repairs in Arizona. $60 million goes directly to highway repairs and the other half goes to cities and towns. However in recent years, the legislature was only distributing $30 million to cities and sweeping the other half. Now, for this fiscal year all $60 million will be distributed to counties.
While this sounds like a win for Yum and neighboring towns, it still won’t fill the $100 million pothole. That $ 60 million appropriation will be distributed to counties based on population. Even with the full amount, Yuma County will only get about $120,000.
Another problem Yuma is facing with the HURF is they are receiving less money from funds distributed by ADOT. City officials say that in 2008, ADOT allocated $8.14 million in HURF funds to the city before the financial crisis. The following year, Yuma only received $6.92 million and continued to decline the following years getting as low as $5.70 million in 2012. The problem now is with the economy healing and getting back to normal, Yuma says they are still receiving less money than they before 2008, even with their population increasing to nearly 100,000 people.
The way the money is gathered and allocated is all based on a distribution formula. All the money is gathered into collections and distributed in the following way; 50.5 percent goes to the state Highway Fund, town and cities get 27.5 percent, and 19 percent goes to counties. The remaining three percent goes exclusively to cities with populations of more than 300,000 people. Phoenix, Tucson and Mesa are only three cities that this applies.
