Sides clash over point of DOT law

The law is the law. Everybody obeys the law. State officials in particular must follow the law as they do the public’s business.

But what happens when a law is so badly and hastily written that no one’s sure what it means? And what if the law in question is major legislation that dramatically rewrites how transportation dollars are spent?

Well, it ain’t pretty, people.

For weeks, representatives of the state Transportation Board and Gov. Sonny Perdue have met in secret trying to negotiate the true meaning of Senate Bill 200. A special DOT board meeting was even scheduled last week to approve final “points of agreement” with Perdue. But the vote had to be canceled because no agreement could be reached. As a result, the law takes full effect tomorrow with important lines of authority still in dispute.

The negotiations themselves have been an odd exercise.

Laws are written by legislators and interpreted by courts. State bureaucrats don’t typically negotiate “points of agreement” to decide what a law says, because they’d be acting as writers of the law, interpreters of the law and executors of the law. Yet that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

Given their lack of success —- not to mention the fact that the Department of Transportation just fired its lead negotiator —- no agreement is likely anytime soon. Bert Brantley, Perdue’s communications director, reluctantly concurs.

“I hope it gets done,” Brantley said Monday. “But I agree with you that the record doesn’t look that promising.”

The story of how Georgia got into this mess is a study in governmental dysfunction. Most people in the Capitol understood that SB 200 was a bad bill that should never become law as written. But the House passed the bill at the passionate insistence of House Speaker Glenn Richardson.

He overrode protests from his own Transportation Committee chairman, he arm-twisted opponents to change their votes on the House floor, and in a rare move for a speaker, he cast the decisive vote himself.

The bill then headed to the Senate, presided over by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle. Cagle was still smarting from criticism for blocking an important transportation bill a year earlier; he wasn’t about to take the blame for holding things up again. So in effect he panicked, moving the bill through the Senate with no changes. That got Cagle off the hook, but it meant the bill could not be put into a conference committee where House and Senate leaders could address its many flaws.

“It was everyone’s assumption or expectation that it would go to conference,” Brantley said, “but it didn’t end up getting there.”

For a month, the bill sat on Perdue’s desk, its defects glaring.

Transportation planning in Georgia has long been plagued by complex, contradictory lines of responsibility, with authority spread among a handful of competing agencies. SB 200 dynamited that structure but left even more confusion in its wake.

Perdue signed it anyway.

The bill was “admittedly not perfect,” Brantley says in a nice bit of understatement. However, he says, the governor still considered it “an improvement over the current system.”

More likely, Perdue looked at the vague language of SB 200 and recognized a power vacuum that he could fill.

Judging from confidential documents produced in negotiations, Perdue is using his leverage as governor to try to force concessions from the Transportation Board beyond those dictated in the law. So far, the board is balking.

The key area of dispute is control of projects built in part or whole through private financing. Whoever controls that process acquires a lot of clout, and part of the bill explicitly gives that duty to the Transportation Board. But other aspects of the bill let the governor claim a greater role.

All in all, we’re in this mess because in trying to outsmart each other, state leaders outsmarted themselves, too. And the sad thing is, they’re still at it.

Blog with Jay Bookman at ajc.com/opinion.

Jay Bookman, an Opinion columnist, writes Tuesday and Friday.