On July 1, 2003, the

Iowa Department of Transportation The Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT) is the government organization in the U.S. state of Iowa responsible for the organization, construction, and maintenance of the primary highway system. Located in Ames, Iowa, DOT is also responsi ...

transferred control of more than of highway to county and local governments in order to save money and to increase operational efficiency. Most of the highways turned over were short spurs connecting small, rural communities and

state parks State parks are parks or other protected areas managed at the sub-national level within those nations which use "state" as a political subdivision. State parks are typically established by a state to preserve a location on account of its natural ...

to the highway system.

Background

Starting in 1979, staff members with the

(DOT) along with county and municipal officials began to reclassify every mile of Iowa's public road system. These classification boards found that on the in the primary system, which comprises

Interstate Highway The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Th ...

U.S. Highway The United States Numbered Highway System (often called U.S. Routes or U.S. Highways) is an integrated network of roads and highways numbered within a nationwide grid in the contiguous United States. As the designation and numbering of these h ...

s, and

state highways A state highway, state road, or state route (and the equivalent provincial highway, provincial road, or provincial route) is usually a road that is either ''numbered'' or ''maintained'' by a sub-national state or province. A road numbered by a ...

, nearly were minor highways that primarily served local traffic. Conversely, they found of major highways that were on the secondary system, which is made up of all rural roads not on the primary highway system. At the time, the

Iowa Code The Code of Iowa contains the statutory laws of the U.S. state of Iowa. The Iowa Legislative Service Bureau is a non-partisan governmental agency that organizes, updates, and publishes the Iowa Code. It is republished in full every odd year, and is ...

provided a mechanism for the transfer of jurisdiction of roads within the state. The two sides would meet and if it was deemed that the road in question needed repairs, the relinquishing body would either make repairs or pay the accepting body the money needed to repair the roadway. Most of the time, the DOT was able to come to an agreement with the county

board of supervisors A board of supervisors is a governmental body that oversees the operation of county government in the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Iowa, Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as 16 counties in New York. There are equivalent agenc ...

as of Iowa roads changed hands in the early 1980s. Some counties and the state could never come to an agreement, as was the case in Johnson County regarding Iowa Highway 979 (Iowa 979). The DOT wanted Johnson County to take over maintenance of the road and offered $160,000 to repair the road (), while the county wanted the state to take over another road. Both sides reached an impasse. Ultimately, Iowa 979 stayed under DOT control. During the 1990s, Iowa experienced a boom in highway construction bolstered by state appropriations from the

National Highway System Designation Act of 1995 The National Highway System (NHS) is a network of strategic highways within the United States, including the Interstate Highway System and other roads serving major airports, ports, military bases, rail or truck terminals, railway stations, pip ...

. New four-lane highways were built all across the state, either by twinning an existing roadway or building new alignments in proximity to the old roads. After opening the new roads, these short segments often stayed on the primary highway system despite not serving an arterial purpose. In 2002, the Road Use Tax Fund Committee, a mix of city, county, and state transportation officials, met to review and recommend changes to Iowa's public road system. The report was necessitated by increasing costs to maintain the highway system and a level of funding that was not keeping up with the rising costs. The committee identified over of state highways which could be turned over to local jurisdictions. Not wanting to repeat the impasses of the 1980s, the DOT got help from

state legislature A state legislature is a legislative branch or body of a political subdivision in a federal system. Two federations literally use the term "state legislature": * The legislative branches of each of the fifty state governments of the United Sta ...

. The general assembly passed SF 451, which gave the DOT a one-time exemption from §306.8, which required the DOT to otherwise compensate a county for giving control of a road. Any roads identified by the Road Use Tax Fund Committee for which a transfer agreement pursuant to §306.8 had not been reached prior to July 1, 2003, would be summarily given to the respective counties without compensation. Even more, counties could not figure any roads offloaded to counties through this mechanism into the calculations for determining their road maintenance budgets for ten years. Some counties were proactive with negotiating with the state. Early in 2003, it was not clear to county officials just how much money would be given to the counties for accepting roads from the state. This made the counties more amenable to accepting money for highways than in previous years. Taylor County officials negotiated a $4.7 million transfer (equivalent to $ in ) of Iowa 49 with the DOT, while Adams County officials did not. The DOT paid out $35 million (equivalent to $ in ) to counties before the July 1, 2003, deadline.

Routes affected

Notes

References

External links

{{Attached KML Transportation in Iowa

Highways A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It is used for major roads, but also includes other public roads and public tracks. In some areas of the United States, it is used as an equivalent term to controlled-access ...