DEL.ICIO.USGEORGIA TRANSPORTATION CHIEF
DOT’s Evans defends conduct
Governor still backs handpicked commissioner
Sunday, November 16, 2008
It’s been a long month for Gena Evans.
Evans took over the state Department of Transportation one year ago, waving the battle flag of reform. Georgia’s transportation commissioner held press conferences and made speeches blasting DOT mismanagement that she had a mandate to fix.
Georgia DOT
Evans: ‘This isn’t about job performance, nor is it about distractions I’m causing. … They do not want to change the good ol’ boy network. … Can they even say anything about my performance?’
But Evans has spent much time defending herself against one controversy after another. This spring, she was publicly reprimanded for not disclosing earlier that she was dating the chairman of DOT’s governing board. They later married. Last week, she survived another wave of criticism over sexually explicit e-mails and allegations of conflict of interest.
On Thursday, after a grueling two-hour closed-door meeting at which DOT committee members discussed Evans’ future, DOT board Chairman Bill Kuhlke was asked about the impact of the ongoing drama.
“I think any kind of distraction you have as you go forward has an impact at some point on your performance,” Kuhlke said of Evans. “The advantage the commissioner has is that she’s got a board that she can lean on. I’d say a majority of the board supports her, and we’re willing to step in and do whatever we need to do to help her.”
Evans said her ability to lead has not been impaired.
“It’s been horribly frustrating about the distraction,” Evans said in an interview Thursday as the board prepared to meet.
“Somehow I’ve managed to lead,” she said. “This isn’t about job performance, nor is it about distractions I’m causing. This comes from other people. They do not want to change the good ol’ boy network. … Can they even say anything about my performance?”
The DOT session Thursday came in response to a barrage of news reports about the commissioner. In the last three weeks:
• WAGA reported that Evans, in a previous state position, dated men who worked for contractors she or her subordinates oversaw, and suggested she helped them. Evans said she did nothing improper.
• TV news stations reported on profane e-mails she sent to a boyfriend on state computers in 2003, and the AJC reported that the messages seemed to violate a state policy for all state agencies against sexually explicit e-mails. Evans said the policy did not apply to her agency.
• The AJC reported that a project her agency oversaw — a high-security lab building now completed — recently leaked gallons of wastewater out of a high-containment lab. No one was injured.
Allegations of impropriety could be particularly damaging to Evans because of her emphasis on high ethical standards for DOT staffers. In March she wrote employees that “weakness of character and integrity, professional ego and personal faults and issues cannot dictate the choices that you make” and that offenders would be disciplined.
Behind the allegations, Evans says, are critics who resist her efforts to clean up the department and disagree with her slowing down building to address financial problems.
As the e-mails surfaced, Evans called reporters to make her case. “This is about big money,” Evans said. “There’s several contractors that are getting pretty upset because I’ve cut off the pipeline. Do I know it’s them? No. That’s not what I’m saying. But I can tell you that I’m making people mad.”
An agent of change
As Evans took over the department on Dec. 1, it was careening toward trouble. The Fast Forward program, Gov. Sonny Perdue’s initiative meant to expedite backlogged road projects, was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Multiple state studies were deeply critical of the department, which sets transportation priorities for the state. Projects, the audits found, were almost always delayed.
Perdue suggested Evans, characterizing her as a change agent. The 13-member board, some of whom preferred a longtime legislator, chose Evans by one vote. Within weeks, Evans had issued reports cataloging lack of accountability for projects and inefficiency, and vowed to fix it. She would not allow projects to be shuffled or shelved based on favoritism, or promise more than could be funded.
Instead she started cutting the project list down to a size the department could actually afford to build, and pledged to choose the projects with objective criteria.
Evans further said, backed by the state auditor, that DOT had overspent its budget in 2007 and was operating with a $456 million budget deficit.
Evans drastically retooled DOT’s accounting and financial predictions. She and the state auditor argued that under state law, DOT cannot sign a road contract without all of the money in hand. Road-building work slowed to a trickle, and spending this year will have to be slashed.
The Atlanta region will probably have to postpone three-quarters of the projects it expected to undertake this year, said Tad Leithead, a transportation committee chairman at the Atlanta Regional Commission, metro Atlanta’s official planning agency.
ARC Chairman Sam Olens, head of Cobb County government, sent Evans a letter in September urging her “to seek a reasonable accounting approach.”
Olens wrote that holding up state contracts for full funding could make it impossible to do large projects, and “just doesn’t make good business sense.”
Steve Parks, director of the Georgia Highway Contractors Association, said the DOT has hundreds of millions of dollars available that the department is not recognizing and that could go toward projects.
Olens said in an interview that the problem could be easily fixed if Georgia changed its accounting policies, and Evans is working on a new type of contract that may address that problem. “It seems to me that the reforms she initiated at GDOT were very much needed,” Olens said.
As for her most powerful supporter, Perdue, a spokesman said none of the turmoil affected his perception of her job performance.
“We would never look at a news report and assume that everything in it is correct,” the spokesman, Bert Brantley, said.
“What the governor knows is her job performance. That’s what he knows, what he has seen, what he can evaluate. He still certainly is very appreciative of what she’s done during her tenure and looks forward to that continuing.”
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