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Friday, December 14, 2007
DOT spinning its wheels, needs culture overhaul
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the state’s best natural storytellers, Court of Appeals Judge John J. Ellington of Soperton, recounts the hat-in-hand visit by Jasper County’s three commissioners to state highway Commissioner “Mr. Jim” Gillis.
The street that runs in front of the courthouse had become heavily congested, the three told Mr. Jim.
We don't have the money, he replied. Streets around courthouses are congested all over Georgia.
But it’s congested to the point of causing accidents, they persisted.
No money, he countered. Besides, accidents are up everywhere.
They rose to depart. If we don’t get this problem fixed, all three of us are going to be defeated in the next election, the commissioners told the legendary highway chief.
Well, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, Mr. Jim is said to have declared.
The road got fixed.
Mr. Jim, who died in 1975, was a former Treutlen County commissioner who served both houses of the General Assembly and, most important, as director of the state Highway Department (as it was then called) between 1948 and 1955 and again from 1959 to 1970. He lorded over a political universe, the currency of which was jobs and roads, that is completely alien to most living Georgians.
Just-appointed State Transportation Commissioner Gena Abraham began her job by attempting to compile a list of project commitments. Within days, the number went from 1,100 or 1,300 to 1,500, to 2,216, to 5,430, to 9,211 as of Thursday morning, of which 2,470 are active. The first reaction is to be alarmed. They don’t know. The second and the correct reaction is to take it as evidence of the need to change a culture that served a past Georgia.
The culture of the early Jim Gillis era was of a poor agricultural state whose farmers were stuck in the mud. Needs far exceeded revenues — needs such as roads, and jobs for displaced farmers driven from the land by erosion, boll weevils and the Depression.
Politics was everything. The State Merit System was created in 1943 by Georgia’s best reform governor, Ellis Arnall, because the highway department was emptied after every gubernatorial election. Roads and jobs were the spoils of a since-outlawed county unit system of voting that made three rural counties, regardless of population, the equal of Fulton. The system worked for the powerful, but not to address the most urgent needs.
Another fine political storyteller recounts one more Jim Gillis story.
It’s of rural legislators going to him to plead for local road projects.
That would cost $2 million, Mr. Jim told the legislators. We don’t have that kind of money.
They plead further. Finally Mr. Jim capitulates.
We don’t have it, he says. But I tell you what: We’ll take it from “Dee-Kalb” County.
Legislators leave, bouncing off the clouds, convinced that they had succeeded not only in getting their road, but that they had gotten it at the expense of metro Atlanta.
Georgia may have 9,211 projects committed. Most of them are the Georgia equivalent of congressional earmarks. They are sops to powerful legislators and to influential county commissioners. They may be built in decades to come. They may not. But they are in the system.
They are in a system that processed paperwork, on timetables that depended on workload, money and influence. But, despite all of that, it was a professional bureaucracy staffed by extraordinarily competent employees who, for decades, did a superb job of anticipating congestion and fixing it. In the past couple of decades, it’s been an agency battered by an inability to decide precisely what it should be doing. It has lost confidence and tends to do best the easiest stuff, such as maintenance.
The old world has changed. The need now is to have a department with a clear, fixed statewide transportation plan, a plan based on measurable cost-benefit and congestion-relief priorities. No earmarks. It needs to be an agency with the expertise to manage and hold accountable private-sector vendors and contractors. It needs to be able to grow and contract quickly.
The start is to get a fix, as Abraham and the DOT board are doing. Then start to change the culture and the system.
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