More Than Potholes: Intro to ARDOT

For someone who has never heard of the Arkansas Department of Transportation, how would you sum it up in roughly one

sentence? Well, that's a good question, Ellen.

I think we're the people who get you where you need to go across our state, whether it be to the goods and services you need, to the recreation you crave.

We're the people getting you there safely and efficiently.

We know these, we call them fun facts, a couple of things that we know about Ardout that we talk about all the time that the public may not know.

Third largest employer in the state, roughly 4,000 employees.

We are overseen by a five-member highway commission.

We have constitutional independence.

We certainly work with the governor, work with the legislature, but we are independent in that.

Some of the common questions that we get from the public, number one has to be funding.

How does RDOC get its money? And then how do we determine how we allocate, spend those monies?

Sure.

That's a good question.

And it's one that we get often.

And we can dig as deep as you want to deeply as you want to into that day.

But primarily, we're funding through a user fees.

So gas tax, user fees on vehicles.

That's where the biggest bulk of our revenue comes from.

Thanks to the voters in 2020, they made the half cent sales tax a permanent source of revenue for us.

So that revenue source is growing.

It's really our only revenue source we see today that's growing with the economy, but primarily user fees and that half cent sales tax.

The same is true for the federal revenue we get.

Those gas taxes that everybody pays at the pump go to D.C.

They come back to each state with strings attached, but we use that funding to construct highways.

I think the funding topic is something that we could probably do a whole episode on in the future because it is, you know, it's very important, but just to let people understand how it all works.