DOT is a ve-wee bad twansit agency
December 13, 2007 at 4:13 pm by Thomas Wheatley in NewsHarsh, but the truth hurts. After just a week on the job, DOT Commissioner Gena Abraham has come to Gov. Sonny Perdue with a confused look on her face and wondered just what the hell kind of a mess she inherited. Abraham, a successful woman with a reputation for efficiency, rose up through the ranks in public service and the construction industry and has been spotlighted as a person who can possibly shake the agency’s inertia.
Here are just some of the problems: When asked how many projects DOT currently has on its books, Abraham was told 1,100. After a couple of updates from staff, she says it appears the total now hovers around 9,211. The 1,553 lawsuits the agency faces are not being managed properly. The accounting operations at DOT, she discovered, don’t even communicate. And while agency honchos told InsiderAdvantage and That Other Paper they honestly don’t believe there to be any chicanery going on, they think a wider gap needs to exist between planners and private industry chums. These are problems with the process, and not the people, they said. And there’s gonna have to be some ch-ch-changes.
Lee Biola, president of Citizens for Progressive Transit, says he hopes the agency can learn some lessons from Abraham’s report. “Before we even knew of problems with the projects, we knew [DOT's] larger aims were out of touch with much of Georgia,” he says. “We know they’ve been resistant to the idea of commuter rail. Very often they do their projects with very little sensitivity to community. Like on 14th Street, they’ve already taken out several restaurants, are impacting pedestrian access and making it a high-speed area for cars. It’s time for them not to be just efficient, but more sensitive.”
Abraham’s findings may be echoed during the upcoming General Assembly when legislators may discuss if taxpayers, especially after all this was revealed, will be able to trust DOT with their tax dollars. Groups such as CFPT — which supports a regional sales tax for transportation projects — say that the best planning decisions are made at the local level and should be paid for by those directly affected by them. If a region has the cash to pursue a transportation project, why should DOT even be involved?
That Other Paper describes DOT as being in “disarray,” but I’ll label it crony-influenced malaise perpetuated by hand-shakery and look-the-other-way-ism. It’s a rare disease that affects certain sedentary members of political bodies. Rarely found in community organizations or jobs where people don’t have the luxury of catching Fat Cat fever, it is usually only treated by moving on to private industry or consulting work. Usually the disease is terminal at that point.
Jay Bookman eloquently outlines the crony culture that has been a mainstay at the state’s transportation agency for decades, as well as the political squabbling that both went on before Abraham’s appointment and appears to be continuing as motorists sit in gridlock.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Things aren’t always as they appear in Gold Dome politics. This particular Perdue PR parade reminds me of 1992 or so when Gov. Zell Miller shoved his choice for commissioner down the DOT board’s throat.
Back then, the situation was different: The board was balking at Miller’s demand that they fire vision-less bureaucrat Hal Rives and replace him with Wayne “Foghorn Leghorn” Shackelford. Miller was hopping mad, so his minions tipped all the Capitol Hill reporters to come out to a meeting where the board was supposedly trying to meet in secret to save Rives’ job. Miller made Shackelford out
to be a reformer who wanted transportation alternatives; he emphasized thqat Shack was a former county extension agent (and downplayed that he was a former aide and partner to high-rolling Gwinnett County developers who happend to be among Miller’s top campaign contributors). Miller very effectively used the press (including me) to portray the board as knuckle-dragging foes to reform.
Under all that pressure, the board caved. But Shackelford turned out to be no reformer at all. He resisted all attempts at balanced transportation alternatives, tried like Hell to steamroll the Outer Perimeter through suburban neighborhoods, and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into roads that serviced Miller’s developer buddies while turning Gwinnett County into a congested hell hole.
Abraham, Perdue’s choice, may very well be a better choice for commissioner than Vance Smith (Speaker Richardson’s puppy dog). But the governor is doing this PR campaign mainly to get the upper hand against Richardson — if he wanted to clean up the DOT, he could have started doing any time during the last five years. Is she a reformer? I’ll believe it when I see her tooting the horn on the first Brain Train commuter line as it leaves the station on the Atlanta-to-Athens run.