The Utah Department of Transportation is offering cities and counties a road-by-road breakdown of maintenance costs for more than 500 miles of highway, hoping to convince the local jurisdictions it's a good idea to take over responsibility for them.

The Utah Association of Counties has a counterproposal that would transfer just 127 highway miles.

The sides are meeting this week, hoping to reach a compromise before the next meeting of a legislative committee that ultimately will craft a bill for the 2006 Legislature aimed at reducing UDOT costs.

The main obstacle, as usual, is money. Before they sign on to any plan, local governments want to know what UDOT spends on the highways and how much of that funding the agency might share, said Arie Van De Graaff, legislative analyst for the Utah Association of Counties.

"If local government can take care of something for less cost, that makes sense," he said. "What we don't want to have happen, obviously, is to have new responsibility but not have money to take that responsibility."

Last month, UDOT presented to the Highway Jurisdictional Transfer Task Force a list of more than 1,300 miles of state highway that UDOT says are too seldom-traveled to merit state control. The list was broken into three ranks, with 504 miles of highway considered top priority.

UDOT spokesman Tom Hudachko said lawmakers in setting up the task force ordered the transfer of all roads not on the national highway system to local jurisdictions, which would have totaled about 4,000 miles. Instead, UDOT analyzed vehicle miles traveled on the highways, and came up with a long list of segments ranging in length from 1,800 feet to 40 miles.

The counties, in their counterproposal, pointed out that several of the roads on UDOT's list were access roads for state parks, several were miles away from any other county roads and many would require major repairs such as new bridges before the counties would accept them.

The counties also claim the state should take over some roads from them, including the Antelope Island causeway in Davis County, Upper Mammoth Creek Road in Garfield County, the Nine Mile Canyon ridge road in Carbon County and all the roads to the oil and gas fields in Duchesne County.

Criteria for state highway designation are established by law. They must provide interstate or inter-region traffic movement, connect major population centers and be spaced so that all developed areas of the state are within "reasonable" distance from the highway.

Local roads are geared more to providing access than movement. If a road is deemed not to meet the state highway criteria, it is either transferred to a municipal agency or abandoned.

The task force must decide how much funding or other resources might be transferred along with the road miles. It will meet again Aug. 16 at the Capitol.

Wasatch Front counties, with greater resources than their rural counterparts, generally were more willing to accept transfers, Van De Graaff said.

There are exceptions, including Piute County, whose commission agreed to take over 19 miles of State Route 153 between Beaver and Junction and a 2-mile stretch of Route 22 near Antimony.

UDOT's request was reasonable, Piute County Commissioner Kay Blackwell said during a telephone interview.

"Our road superintendent would like to see us get more roads because we could take care of them as well as they are now, or better," he said.