Another dispatch out of impoverished rural West Virginia, this one focused on roads

Haley Messenger reports for NBC news out of Clay County, West Virginia, under the headline "With roads so bad even the ambulance can't pass, this county hopes for infrastructure dollars."  The story is not only about roads and how they get paid for, but also whether "bigger counties," presumably referring to metropolitan areas, get more than their fair share of a state's funds.  

When Clay County Commissioner Fran King relays the issues to the West Virginia Department of Transportation’s Division of Highways, the agency frequently cites a lack of funding for road repairs.

“But then when funds come into the state, they’re allocated for the bigger counties to put in byways and roundabouts,” she said. “They forget about the people out here like us that need help, so that we can get our children educated, people can go to work.”

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King also said the state’s control over county roads serves as a barrier to getting local complaints resolved. In West Virginia, the Division of Highways controls 89 percent of miles, leading every other U.S. state, according to a recent report from TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit organization.

“We have no power,” King said. “Those complaints come to us, then we report them, but nothing becomes of them and then the citizens think that we could do something about it but we cannot.”      

The story also quotes West Virginia Civil Engineering professor David Martinelli about why road repairs are more costly in places like the "Mountain State." 

The most expensive element of highway construction is earthmoving operations. We've done a lot of it because of our topography — so that makes highway construction in West Virginia, right out of the gate, significantly more expensive. And that's true for a lot of rural states or rural areas.

Clay County's population is just a tad under 10,000.