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COLUMBIA -- When state highway engineers recently crafted a list of the 20 most needed non-interstate road projects in the state, two in Greenville County topped the record.

But how do highway commissioners, presented with similar lists in categories ranging from bridges to intersection and safety projects, decide which projects get the agency's scarce funds?

Lawmakers and commissioners are working on a system to objectively rank road and bridge projects so that taxpayers see what the actual needs are. If they can agree on a system, officials say South Carolina would become the first state in the nation to rank infrastructure projects using engineering criteria.

"There is no shortage of good projects," John Walsh, deputy state highway engineer, told commissioners last week. "The issue is what is the best project."

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Indeed, South Carolina faces a backlog of $3 billion in maintenance and construction work at a time when agency cash flows are tight and gas tax revenues are essentially flat. The state's gas tax has not been raised since 1987.

Lawmakers working on restructuring the giant agency want to change the way projects are selected, arguing the current system allows politics to influence the process too much.

Even before lawmakers started proposing a ranking process, DOT Chairman Tee Hooper asked the agency's engineers to design a new system.

"We can't take the politics out," Hooper told colleagues at last week's board meeting. "What we want to do is present for politicians what the engineers think."

Hooper and three other commissioners spent more than an hour with the agency's top engineers Thursday looking at the engineers' first attempt at a ranking formula.

The formula combines the factors of accident rates, pavement condition, truck travel and a road's ratio of volume to capacity.

Walsh asked the commissioners to help determine how each factor should be weighted. Should safety receive more weight, for instance, than truck traffic?

"I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell you," Commissioner Bobby Jones told Walsh.

Hooper then asked the engineers, who sat on the perimeter of the boardroom, to come to the table and engage in a debate.

Maintenance Director Jim Feda said one of the problems is comparing categories as equals, since safety projects seem to be spot cases, and it is difficult to compare bridge projects and pavement reconditioning projects with resurfacing an interstate.

"Basically what we're doing here is comparing bananas to peaches and apples to oranges," he said.

Another issue, he said, is whether to pour money into repairing the worst roads instead of preserving the good ones. Hooper said his priority is to "maintain what we have."

The group suggested removing some categories, such as bridges and safety projects, from an across-the-board ranking and determine an amount from the budget that can be spent on each.

The engineers plan to return to the board in February with a proposal for the commissioners to consider.

That would please Rep. Annette Young, a Summerville Republican chairing the House DOT Study Committee, who wants an objective ranking system.

"It puts some teeth in there when it comes to accountability," she said. "I think everybody wants accountability in this bill. And that has got to be one of the major pieces of accountability."