Take County 21- please.

Mercer County asked the North Dakota Department of Transportation on Thursday to take over a 10-mile stretch of paved county road that carries heavy trucks and hundreds of workers to energy plants and a coal mine northwest of Beulah.

The county says the road is expensive to maintain and more rightly belongs on the state's secondary road system than in a county budget because of traffic load and state revenue from the energy plants.

The road was paved when the plants were being built three decades ago, and is already in line for its third heavy overlay at about a $250,000 price tag, the county said. That compares to some county roads that have never needed more asphalt and are nearly 15 years old.

The DOT said it's more interested in a trade-off than a takeover.

"Trading miles, we're serious about that," said DOT director Francis Ziegler at a meeting at department headquarters attended by a dozen Mercer County representatives.

The county and transportation officials agreed to study the request and in that context, discuss a stretch of state road within the county that the county would agree to maintain.

"We'll do the best we can," Ziegler said. "We can only do so much."

State law says the state can only have 7,700 miles of paved road in its system. Right now, it's within 82 miles of having that many.

Transportation officials said it's been years since the state took over county road miles without horse-trading.

To do otherwise would strain the department's budget and open a floodgate of requests, Ziegler said.

The good news for North Dakota is that the economy is growing, but the flip side is that "transportation has to be the engine," he said.

Mercer County Commission chairman Frank Bitterman said that in all the work to gear up for energy development, transportation was an overlooked piece of the puzzle.

"It's a problem that's 25 years old and getting more expensive every year," Bitterman said.

The county is paying the price - about $25,000 a mile, compared to an average of $28,500 for all state highway miles, including interstate - to maintain a road that carries more traffic than many miles on the state system.

County 21 heads northwest to the plants and mine from the intersection of Highways 200 and 49 at Beulah.

County road engineers said the daily traffic count at the intersection is around 2,000, and about 1,000 at the turnoff to the energy valley, where Dakota Gasification Co., Antelope Valley Station and Coteau's Freedom Mine are all collocated.

If the state were to take over the heavily trafficked County 21, the county would still have 25 miles of pavement leading to and from the energy plants, and another 70 throughout the rest of the county.

It has a $3 million road budget this year, which includes about $600,000 in federal transportation aid money, said Mercer County Auditor Monte Erhardt.

The study will look at the county's revenue, including coal severance taxes, condition of the roads generally and whether County 21 needs work to be at the state standard.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-748-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)