Maybe not cash-strapped. In my experience (I worked for local government for several years), road funding is always at the bottom of the political campaign list because it's one of those problems that is very easy to just kick down the road (no pun intended). In my jurisdiction, we wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars repaving the roads every 3 years or so with the cheap stuff instead of tearing up the road entirely and rebuilding it properly to last 20 years for only double the price of the 3 year repavement. So I see this from the perspective of allowing lazy politics to continue in these towns.
