Our schools may not be the best, but we're willing to pay for roads.

Given the absence of freeze/thaw cycles, the lightly traveled rural roads here never get that bad. A few roads I ride regularly hadn't been paved in at least a decade and they were still in reasonable shape. The edges got gnarly in some places, but there was still plenty of decent road surface. But over the last two years, they've re-paved them all as well as newly paving a number of roads that had previously been dirt. It's been great for cyclists as the newly paved roads open up more variety. My regular routes are all in the poorest county in the state, so I don't know where they got the money. They're even putting in sidewalks in few places in the sort of rural areas where they've never been previously seen and don't really seem all that necessary. However they're managing to fund these efforts, it's a good thing for me.