What you need to know:

Find out about this crucial effort to secure dedicated funding for water, sewer, transportation and other infrastructure needs. Find out how you can be a part of this effort.

Keeping our foundations strong requires
partnership at the state level

Securing a strong foundation. North Carolina citizens must have clean water, good roads, safe bridges, solid transportation systems and other infrastructure essentials. These are the basics that support and enable our daily lives. Without this strong foundation, good jobs, good schools, adequate housing and vibrant, diverse communities are not possible. These facilities cannot be built and then forgotten; maintenance and improvements are constantly required.

We cannot afford to let our foundation crumble. A recent comprehensive report by North Carolina's civil engineers gave the state's roads a grade of D. The N.C. DOT has identified a $65 billion gap between available funding and actual needs for the state transportation system over the next 25 years. Cities and towns responding to a recent League survey identified at least $10 billion in municipal road needs (27 percent responded). Water 2030, an initiative of the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center, determined that $16.3 billion will be needed over the next 25 years for water and sewer system repairs, improvements and upgrades to meet new environmental requirements.

Those statewide needs translate into hundreds of thousands of people spending too much time caught in traffic jams, wasting time and energy. They mean communities where miles of 100-year-old sewer pipes need replacement while plants need upgrades. They result in towns losing precious clean water because pipes leak.

At the local level, citizens have been making significant investments in water and sewer facilities, road improvements and other infrastructure improvements. Transportation spending equals about 11 percent of all municipal expenditures, about $2.5 billion from 2003 through 2005. Tar Heel citizens also are investing in maintenance and improvements to water and sewer facilities. Over the past five fiscal years, capital spending on water and sewer averaged at least 35 percent compared to FY 2005 municipal water and sewer revenues.

Despite these major investments at the local level, we are falling further behind. We need adequate, additional long-term revenue sources. We need a state level partnership to keep our foundations strong.