The Coastal Conservation League’s Patty Pierce answered my message from yesterday thusly:
Brad,
Brian White tried to do the same amendment that you are referring to at the Committee level because the staff drafted the bill incorrectly according to him. Representative Lucas liked it this way, so he may have been the last legislator to speak to the staff when this section was drafted. Nevertheless, Rep. White tried to get this corrected at the Committee level, but the Committee was tired and didn’t feel like talking about it that late night when they were trying to wrap things up on this bill, so he said he’d just do the amendment during the floor debate. Everyone knew it was coming, and there was agreement on it.
Personally, I think once the priorities are adopted that they should not be changed at all until the next time the priorities are supposed to be adopted by the Commission again. Also, setting the priorities should also be the Commission’s job completely and not the Secretary of Transportation’s in the House bill, so I thought this was a good amendment. It kept the duties separated. It didn’t make sense for the Secretary of Transportation to be able to reach across to the Commission and ask that the priorities be changed. The Secretary is supposed to run the day to day operations of the DOT in the House bill. The Commission should set the transportation priorities. I don’t like the 2/3rds vote to be able to change the transportation priorities, but I can sometimes see when I cannot be effective in changing the minds of some legislators, so I stayed out of this fight.
I’m copying Elizabeth on this note to keep her in the loop.
Send any other questions that you may have my way. I’ll be glad to give you background material if it helps.patty
We may be miscommunicating here. I realize about what happened in committee. What I don’t understand is why, after working so hard to get sound priority-setting criteria in place, the League would go along with letting the commission — a commission, of all things, the very root of the current problem — toss the priorities any time 2/3 of them wanted to. At the very least, you would want them to have to wait until some other party — in this case, the secretary, who would supervise the people who actually have the wherewithal to set priorities on the basis of objective criteria rather than mere political whim — suggests the changes.
By eliminating that check, you place the commission just as much in the driver’s seat as it is now, setting all your vaunted reform at naught. And for this the league cast aside any thought of actual structural, fundamental reform?
Eliminating the commission — in any way, shape or form — is essential to accountability at this most unaccountable of agencies. Keep the commission, and you can kiss any other reforms you’ve worked for goodbye, because they won’t be around very long — especially if you agree to make it autonomous from the beginning.
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Governor Campbell asked the public to submit ideas for improving what was then the Highway Department. I submitted several detailed suggestions, one of which was how to prioritize road work and how to do it. Putting the system in place back then would have been a full-time job for one engineer. Today, with powerful personal computer tools and the entire road system in a CAD system and database, it would be even easier to set up lifetime maintenance schedules with budgets 20 years into the future.
Once the money is allocated to the top projects, change should be made only by an emergency like a tornado, hurricane or earthquake that truly alters the relative condition of some roads.
If you have a commission being pressured by legislators and locals to subvert what is an engineering management project, contracts become less stable, and contractors respond by charging contingency markups to cover the increased risk of doing business with a poor customer.