Georgia transportation plan a power shift over funds

At Thursday’s state Transportation Board meeting, everyone at the Department of Transportation offices in Midtown knew the biggest issue was not on the agenda: They were facing the greatest threat to their power in almost a half century.

Four hours later at his Capitol office, Gov. Sonny Perdue held a news conference. The governor announced legislation to upend Georgia’s transportation administration. The key provision of the bill — which would become the Transforming Transportation Investment Act if it is passed — is a new authority with an 11-member board appointed by the governor, the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House. It would take the power to choose road projects from the 13-member Transportation Board chosen by the General Assembly.

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Supporters of the plan say it is needed reform for a long-dysfunctional system that lacks public accountability. Critics were quick to charge that it unwisely concentrates power in the executive branch.

“This places transportation completely in the political arena rather than in the hands of an independently elected board,” said David Doss, a board member and former board chairman.

The stakes are high. Winners in the political tussle will control a $2 billion budget. How the money is spent is vital: Atlanta’s congestion ranked second-worst in the nation last year, and business leaders say it is costing the state jobs.

Perdue’s plan, perhaps his boldest exercise of power, comes as his second and final term winds down. He is seeking, in part, to rectify a key area where his administration stumbled: transportation.

“We all share that frustration about transportation,” said Perdue, flanked by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson.

Changing transportation “has been much tougher than I ever imagined,” he said.

The problem, Perdue said, was he didn’t have control.

Under the proposal, the governor would appoint five members of the State Transportation Authority board, plus a secretary of transportation.

The authority would merge the current State Road and Tollway Authority and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and develop and implement statewide transportation plans. State law now gives the DOT control of most of its budget and gas tax revenues. The new plan gives the Legislature control of gas tax funds, though it must be spent on transportation. And the plan requires the governor to submit a transportation budget for lawmakers’ approval. The authority would approve most statewide projects, but the Legislature would select projects worth 10 percent of transportation spending. There would still be a DOT board, but it would have a lot less to do.

At least part of Perdue’s motivation appears to be to repair a blunder of his time in office, the $15.6 billion “Fast Forward” transportation program.

The program, announced with fanfare by Perdue in 2004, was to condense 18 years of infrastructure projects into six years, partly by borrowing against future federal funds. The board authorized borrowing up to $3 billion. For several years, DOT officials told the public the plan was working well. It wasn’t.

In late 2007, a new DOT commissioner, Gena Evans, announced the program was billions of dollars over budget and that thousands of projects on the DOT’s agenda had no likely funding. The revelations angered and embarrassed Perdue.

“I tried to pour money on the problem in the past and it only went up in smoke,” he said, adding that many DOT projects have been of “no value or little value.”

Even when Fast Forward seemed to be going smoothly, there was political infighting among legislators and the DOT. Lawmakers claimed board members made decisions without consulting them and that staff wouldn’t answer their questions. In 2006, they fired across the DOT’s bow: Bills were introduced in the House that could have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the DOT’s budget.

All the while, the DOT board was demanding its staff shape up. It supported audits that unearthed systemic problems, from getting projects started to keeping accurate books.

Last year, an audit commissioned by Perdue found huge accounting problems and big deficits. Spending stalled on billions in road projects.

While it remains unclear whether legislators would give up their power to elect board members, each of the three top leaders has something political to gain from upending the DOT.

“They will be controlling over $2 billion of money coming in every year. These three people, they can say the Legislature has control, but when it really gets down to it, those people are the ones to say how that money gets spent,” said Jimmy Benefield, a former chairman of the House Transportation Committee and lobbyist for the DOT. He left the DOT shortly after Evans became commissioner.

Some DOT board members say they are mystified by Perdue’s move. They argue they have been working to expose problems and fix them.

“The governor has said that this is one of the best boards he’s worked with on several occasions and the DOT board was going to be his quarterback, so I don’t understand what they mean by dysfunctional,” Rudy Bowen, chairman of the board’s administrative committee, said Wednesday.

Sam Wellborn, chairman of the board’s finance committee, called the governor’s plan perplexing.

“It ain’t been six months ago when he [Perdue] declared publicly that we were the best DOT board he had ever run across. He said we would be his quarterback, and now it seems like he wants us to be his water boy,” Wellborn said.

Perdue said Thursday that his legislation was not “about bad people” but about a faulty process.

For decades, Georgia politicians fought like Chicago aldermen over control of the state highway department.

Governors steered road contracts to areas to win backers. Political enemies got nothing.

“[Governors] put roads where they thought they could get votes,” former Gov. Carl Sanders said.

Sanders reformed the department in 1963. He moved it out of the governor’s office and established an independent board to oversee the transportation budget.

Interviewed last week from his offices at the law firm Troutman Sanders, Sanders said he didn’t know enough about Perdue’s proposal to form an opinion. But he said he thought taking control of transportation out of the governor’s office improved “a very, very corrupt situation.”

“For the time that I was in there and for a long time after that, it worked fine,” he said.