Press Release
Akron Beacon Journal Op-Ed: The Hidden System Behind the Roads We All Use
Jun 2, 2026 - Summit County, OH
***NOTE: This is County Engineer Alan Brubaker, P.E., P.S.'s full opinion piece. A shortened version was also sent to the Akron Beacon Journal for formatting purposes. It can be found by following the more button below.
Most people assume they know who is responsible for the roads they drive on every day. City streets are the city’s responsibility. Interstate freeways are the state’s. Roads in a township are the township’s. This is completely understandable but in Ohio, it’s not that straightforward.
In reality, Ohio counties maintain 29,088 miles of roadway and 15,768 bridges, a significant and often misunderstood portion of the transportation network. This accounts for nearly a quarter of all roadways in the state. In Summit County, Ohio, that includes major routes in townships, all township bridges, and even bridges located within city boundaries. These are not quiet rural roads. They are heavily traveled corridors often carrying commuter traffic and significant semi-truck volumes. Most residents use a county road or bridge every single day without realizing it. Whether it is recognized or not, that infrastructure must be maintained.
The challenge is that the funding system supporting county roads and bridges was never designed for the transportation network we operate today.
A significant portion of county road funding comes from vehicle registration fees. In Summit County, those fees are made up of four separate $5.00 levies approved over time by local elected officials and voters. The first was enacted in 1968, two more were passed in 1987, and the most recent was added in January 2018. The State of Ohio collects an additional $34.50 per registration, and some cities have put another $5.00 fee that goes directly to the city. These local fees required repeated approval and public support, and we are grateful our community has consistently supported infrastructure funding in that way.
But even with enacting all four permissive license fees, the county system is under strain.
We often hear that counties are “funded by the gas tax,” but that is largely a misconception. Only a very small portion of the state gas tax goes to all 88 counties, and that amount is divided evenly regardless of population, road mileage, or bridge inventory. As a result, Summit County receives a relatively small share of gas tax revenue despite the scale of infrastructure we are responsible for maintaining. In addition, the state gas tax is a 38.5 cents per gallon, whether the price of a gallon of gas is $3 or $6. This is fixed collection that does not account for the inflation factor. In fact, the higher the fuel prices, the less fuel is purchased, resulting in decreased gas tax revenue. Finally, improved vehicle fuel economy, which is a good thing, also results in less fuel purchased.
At its core, the U.S. road and bridge funding system has long been based on a user-fee model. That model is no longer keeping pace with reality. The growth of electric vehicles, changes in truck registration patterns, and decades of inflation have all weakened the connection between road usage and road funding. The gas tax as a way of funding roads and bridges needs modernization to reflect how people actually use the system today.
At the same time, vehicle registration revenue sources have weakened. The fees are another stagnant amount and do not account for the inflation factor. The economic impacts of COVID, shifts in trucking activity, and changes in vehicle registration patterns have all reduced our funding base. Increasingly, large fleet operators are not registering trucks in Summit County, even when those trucks are based here and heavily use our roads every day. Our vehicle registration revenue has decreased 5.13% since 2021. That amounts to a $1,000,000.00 dollar drop. This is a dramatic decrease in the one revenue stream we have that brings in most of the revenue.
In 2025, our office operated with approximately $20 million in revenue while maintaining 280 bridges and 316 miles of pavement. One bridge in our system carries an estimated replacement cost of $60 million. These are not abstract figures, they represent real infrastructure that must be inspected, maintained, and eventually replaced to ensure public safety.
It is also important to address a misconception we hear often: that high property taxes should result in better roads, or that increases in property taxes directly fund road and bridge improvements. That is not how the system is structured. The Summit County Engineer’s Office receives no funds from property taxes. While property taxes fund important services across county government, our road and bridge system is supported through separate and limited revenue streams.
Another important reality is that the system we operate under was largely designed for a very different era, when counties were primarily rural and responsible for simple two-lane road networks. Today, urban counties like Summit, along with Cuyahoga, Hamilton, and Montgomery, manage complex transportation systems with multi-lane arterials, turn lanes, signals, curbs, and far higher traffic volumes. These facilities cost significantly more to maintain than the original funding framework anticipated.
We are doing everything we can within those constraints. Since 2009, our workforce has decreased from 138 employees to about 100. We have eliminated debt. We carefully prioritize every project based on safety, necessity, and long-term value. But even with disciplined stewardship, the underlying reality remains; costs continue to rise faster than revenues. We’ve seen tremendous increases in costs just like every family in America. Road construction costs have surged 68% since 2021 and increased another 6.2% in first 5 months of 2026 alone. We are not immune from the oil costs either – the higher the cost of crude oil, the higher the cost of asphalt.
That brings us to the difficult part of the conversation, what can be done?
Our preferred long-term solution would be a restructuring of how state and federal road and bridge dollars are distributed, so that counties receive a more direct and predictable share of transportation funding. This would better align responsibility with funding and reduce reliance on local fees and levies.
However, we also recognize the reality: that is likely the most difficult option to achieve politically.
Other local options exist, such as a county road and bridge levy or dedicating a portion of sales tax revenue to infrastructure, as some counties in Ohio have done. But we fully understand why any fee or tax increase is a hard sell for other elected officials and for the public. In Summit County, where property tax concerns are real and where the sales tax is among the lowest in the state, these conversations are complex and require broad consensus and voter approval. There is no easy path forward.
Still, doing nothing is not a neutral option. It simply means the gap between needs and resources continues to grow.
Infrastructure does not fail all at once. It declines gradually, until one day it does not perform the way people expect. Our goal is to prevent that outcome through planning, transparency, and honest discussion about how the system is funded.
We will continue to be responsible stewards of the resources we are given. But we also believe it is our duty to clearly explain the reality: the system as currently structured does not match the system we are responsible for maintaining.
The roads and bridges will still be there. The real question is whether the funding system will be.
