AUGUSTA – One of the first proposals headed for the Legislature’s newly seated Transportation Committee calls for $305 million in repairs to 2,400 miles of state roads and $14 million more a year in state road aid to cities and towns.

Of more concern to officials in small towns, it will also recommend a responsibility shift that would have municipalities performing year-round maintenance on 2,400 miles of road they currently maintain only in the winter.

That swap of duties would leave the Maine Department of Transportation with year-round responsibility for 1,500 miles of roads it currently splits with the cities and towns through which they run.

“We’re trying to bring some common sense and some flexibility into determining the expenditure of taxpayer money so that the right people are working on the right roads, so there’s no overlap,” said Pete Coughlan, director of the community services division at the MDOT.

The proposal — expected to be included in an MDOT report due out Saturday — is the result of more than a year’s worth of meetings among municipal and state transportation officials charged with figuring out a way to simplify a system that parses out maintenance and improvement responsibilities for Maine’s state roads.

Whether the so-called “highway simplification proposal” makes its way through the legislative process, however, is far from certain. The report is likely to recommend millions of dollars in road investments just as budget writers look to close a budget gap expected to exceed $800 million for the upcoming two-year budget cycle.

“We did not tackle where the money’s going to come from,” Coughlan said. “That’s left to the policymakers and the new administration.”

The simplification plan is “a really good idea,” said Rep. Rich Cebra, a Naples Republican and the Transportation Committee’s House chairman.

“We could really do it. We just have to have the political will to do it,” he said. “We need to have enough people who will take a little compromise.”

And funding it will be no easy task, said Rep. Edward Mazurek, D-Rockland, the ranking Democrat on the transportation panel.

“One of the biggest problems is the initial cost of fixing, and the long-term responsibilities to maintain, (the affected roads),” he said.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Paul LePage said it was too early to comment on the simplification plan.

Some municipal officials are concerned that many of the costs in the new maintenance arrangements on state roads will ultimately fall to them.

The proposal recommends towns take on year-round work on the 2,400 miles of so-called “minor collector” state roads — lower-traffic roads that allow drivers to travel within a specific region. Currently, towns and cities plow the minor collector roads in the winter and leave summer maintenance to the state.

As part of the swap, the MDOT would repair all minor collector roads to the point where no significant improvements would be needed for 10 years — an investment pegged at $305 million. The MDOT would also increase local aid to cities and towns to bankroll maintenance on the minor state roads.

The condition of minor collector roads has suffered in recent years as state transportation officials devoted limited funds to other, larger projects, said Kate Dufour, a legislative advocate at the Maine Municipal Association.

“The minor collector roads are at the bottom of their funding list,” she said.

As proposed, Dufour said, the simplification plan would direct resources to those minor roads and make it clear who’s responsible for their upkeep.

If it’s implemented, the highway simplification plan would have a range of effects on the towns and cities through which the major and minor collector roads run, said Glen Ridley, a Litchfield selectman who sat on the group that worked on the proposal.

In rural Litchfield, he said, the maintenance swaps would leave the town maintaining 14 miles of road throughout the year, rather than only in the winter.

Litchfield would give up all maintenance responsibilities on 2 miles of road in town that qualify as major collector roads — higher–traffic roads that allow drivers to travel between regions. “That’s just not going to work for a town like Litchfield,” Ridley said. “We were giving up two (miles) and getting 14. That’s huge.”