Key local officials said a bill pending before a state House committee could cause serious setbacks in efforts to upgrade roads in eastern North Carolina.

A couple of these officials pointed to the adverse economic effects they believe the bill could bring č the on-paper equivalent of driving off a proverbial cliff.

“Essentially it’s a recipe for less economic growth,” said Tom Thompson, Beaufort County’s chief economic developer.

Filed April 5, House Bill 635 would adjust the state’s highway equity formula to give urban areas an unquestioned advantage over road money, Thompson asserted.

Basically, the equity formula is a set of criteria that determine who gets how much of the road-funding pie set out for the Old North State’s intrastate system and the Transportation Improvement Program.

The TIP channels money to lots of road projects, and included in a past TIP was the U.S. Highway 17 Bypass around Washington.

Marc Finlayson is executive director of the Highway 17 Association, which advocates for improvements to U.S. 17, especially the conversion of its entire length in the state to four lanes.

According to Finlayson, the highway equity formula equates to money raised through the state’s Highway Trust Fund.

The formula results in the distribution of funds for road construction and maintenance to different highway regions across the state, he explained.

Under the current formula, 50 percent of the funding is parceled out based on population, a criterion people like Finlayson say favors North Carolina’s metropolitan centers.

“So automatically the big places get more than the little places because half of it is per capita,” he pointed out.

And 25 percent of the distribution is based on how many miles each funding region still has to improve, including state highways and United States highways that aren’t interstates.

“Clearly, the rural highway divisions have more of those kinds of roads than the urban roads do,” Finlayson said.

Finally, 25 percent of the money is shared equally across the seven highway regions.

Under House Bill 635, the population-tied part of the formula would rise to 66 percent from 50 percent, Finlayson related.

The remaining 34 percent of the cash would be shared equally across the various highway divisions.

The formula’s calculation for intrastate miles improvement would be removed entirely, Finlayson said.

“That’s the one criterion that favors rural divisions over urban ones,” he concluded.

The bill has drawn the bipartisan opposition of the state lawmakers who represent Beaufort County in the N.C. General Assembly.

And both of these men indicated they would lobby against the bill.

“It would be absolutely devastating, in my opinion, to the east and to the west, to any of the rural areas,” said Sen. Stan White, D-Dare.

“The bottom line is I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep the equity formula as it is because I think it is as fair a system as is available to us at this time,” he added later.

White served on the N.C. Board of Transportation before being appointed to his current post in the Senate.

“The formula, by no stretch of the imagination, is perfect, but the folks that drafted that formula did as good a job as anyone could have done under the circumstances,” he said.

Rep. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort, called the bill “shocking.”

“I was really surprised at how bad it is,” Cook commented. “The old formula for distribution of transportation funds required that 50 percent of the allocation be based on population. This new bill requires 66 percent of the funds to be allocated to be based on population.”

Most of the state’s recent population growth has occurred in its central core, Cook observed.

To Cook and others who oppose it, House Bill 635 could turn into a safety issue for the rural east, which contains roads č stretches of U.S. 17 among them č that many consider too narrow for comfort.

“It’s a detriment not only to the people who live here,” Cook said. “Let’s look at, say, route 17 between New Bern and Chocowinity. I believe that’s maybe the worst road in the state. It’s dangerous.”

The Highway 17 Association and allied groups have long called for the expansion of U.S. 17 from two to four lanes from the Virginia line to the South Carolina border.

Though significant progress has been made toward that goal, Thompson, the economic developer, fears House Bill 635 could put the four-laning of U.S. 17 on the back burner.

“I think it could impact U.S. 17 severely because that’s the kind of highway that depends on regional rural funding to get from point A to point B,” he said.

The General Assembly’s website shows House Bill 635 was sent to the House Committee on Transportation Thursday.

No further word on the bill’s progress was immediately available.

Calls to the bill’s four primary sponsors weren’t returned Friday or Saturday.