transparency Archives - Transportation For America

Will Oregon’s DOT change how they do business?

Buttressed by public opinion, a new oversight effort and legislative action, momentum is building in Oregon for increasing transparency and accountability in how the state’s transportation agency does its business.

I-5 over the Columbia River in Oregon. Flickr photo by Doug Kerr. httpswww.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/7459949082

Governor Kate Brown and the Oregon legislature have been working for well over a year to restart efforts to raise new state revenues for transportation after a failed attempt in 2015. Two separate special committees have toured the state for listening sessions, and have developed or are in the process of developing proposals for a transportation investment package.

These efforts to raise new funding have put a spotlight on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). A growing number of legislators, local leaders and members of the public are asking whether or not ODOT’s investment choices are maximizing return on investment, and whether those decisions are made with adequate accountability and transparency.

While the agency is respected for innovative programs like ConnectOregon’s competitive grants and a strong commitment to fix-it-first principles, it has stumbled occasionally as well, including the failure to win support for the problematic Columbia River Crossing mega-project, massive cost overruns on a rural highway project in the landslide-prone coastal mountains, and ill-timed miscalculation of carbon emissions estimates related to failed 2015 transportation investment legislation.

In late 2015 members of the legislature demanded, and the governor commissioned, an audit of ODOT to review the agency’s management structure and oversight.

Just this last week, the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC), a body of five volunteers appointed by the governor to oversee ODOT, has jumped into the fray. OTC Chair Tammy Baney took the unusual step of sending a formal letter to Governor Brown requesting dedicated independent staff and participation in the agency director’s performance review — to help the OTC fulfill its oversight duties.

This latest move by the OTC coincides with similar efforts in the legislature.

Representative Jeff Reardon (D) has introduced a bill (HB 2532) directing the “Oregon Transportation Commission to adopt rules establishing quantitative system for scoring and ranking transportation projects that are being considered by commission for inclusion in Statewide Transportation Improvement Program.”

Transportation for America has assisted in developing this bill, which draws on programs in Virginia, Massachusetts, Washington State, and others. The legislative session starts this week, and the bill already enjoys support from five other legislators, including top Senate transportation committee Republican Brian Boquist.

With all these efforts to reform ODOT now in motion, this Thursday’s meeting of the new oversight group should be lively. OTC members and meeting attendees will learn about the draft findings from the ODOT audit for the first time — a topic that will almost certainly touch on the accountability and transparency of ODOT’s business decisions.

Maryland’s governor is fighting a more objective process for choosing transportation projects

While other states and regions across the country are using new tools to evaluate potential transportation projects and pick the ones that offer the best return for taxpayer money, Maryland Governor Hogan and his administration are staunchly opposing similar new policies that add accountability and transparency to that process.

Many Americans find the byzantine nature of transportation decisions confusing, making them less willing to hand over more of their hard-earned tax dollars to increase investments in transportation — but who can blame them?

The public wants to know the answers to questions like: “Will these dollars give us better, safe, reliable, affordable access to necessities like jobs, education, health care, and groceries?” Measuring what transportation dollars are buying, in a clear way that matters to the public, is critical for restoring this trust — as well as for getting the most bang for the buck.

This was why Maryland legislators in 2016 crafted a new law to measure and score transportation projects based on state goals, helping to program (i.e. spend) scarce transportation dollars more objectively. The legislation in question requires the state department of transportation to objectively evaluate potential projects based on their impacts in categories like economic development, safety, community vitality, and accessibility.

The Governor vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode that veto and passed it in 2016. And now, as Maryland starts their 2017 legislative session, Governor Larry Hogan (R) has declared his number one legislative priority to be the repeal of this legislation. Last week a repeal bill was introduced.

Marylanders: Tell your state reps to defend transparency and accountability in transportation projects.

The governor is demanding a repeal of the law that created this new objective scoring system so he can preserve the opaque, politically driven process where projects are picked based on horse trades and political influence, not on need or expected benefits.

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In attacking what he calls the “road kill bill” and warning of “catastrophic” consequences, Gov. Hogan has exaggerated and incorrectly stated the provisions of the law. While the Governor said the law would “absolutely be responsible for the elimination of nearly all of the most important transportation priorities in every single jurisdiction all across the state,” the law explicitly gives the administration the power to fund any necessary project.

Del. Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore, pictured below), who championed the project scoring legislation last year, was astonished by the Governor’s sweeping opposition.“It’s just a score, and that shows to us, the taxpayers, how we’re spending our money in a transparent way,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “I don’t know why the governor is so opposed to transparency in transportation funding.”

Delegate Brooke Lierman, right, one of the sponsors of the original legislation, explaining the mechanics of the bill to others at our Capital Ideas conference.

In recent years, several other states under Democrat or Republican control alike, have adopted similar scoring systems to clearly evaluate projects and communicate to taxpayers that the state is making sound investments. For example, in the past year Virginia and Massachusetts have each employed new project scores to build their state transportation plans.

Yet rather than follow these well-functioning models, the administration released a clumsy set of measures to implement the legislation.

Virginia’s DOT went all-in on the new process their legislature created, producing a new website and a 90-page step-by step guide to their process. In contrast, the Maryland DOT’s regulations run just a page and a half and offer no explanation for the basis for scores and weights. While Gov. Hogan has erroneously claimed that the new law would require that state to cancel dozens of planned projects, under the law the scoring process is only advisory — it just provides a new way for lawmakers and citizens alike to see which projects are being advanced and compare the relative merits of each.

Maryland’s taxpayers deserve transparent and objective scores that would let them understand state spending and need. Instead they have gotten a cynical, straw man argument, in which the governor has painted a sensible, good-governance reform as the “road kill bill.”

The Maryland General Assembly should not repeal this important new policy and the administration should use the flexibility in the law to develop a scoring process that matches the state’s need. We’ll be keeping our eyes on the developments down the road in Annapolis.

Update: North Carolina legislature adjourns without addressing political meddling in transportation selection process

The NC legislature adjourned their session without addressing a damaging cap on state funds intended for a Triangle area light rail project. Their actions were widely decried in the state and circumvented a new bipartisan state process for evaluating transportation projects on the merits and awarding state funds to the best projects, intended to be free from political meddling.

As we previously reported this week, some unknown North Carolina legislators used the budget process to interfere with the state’s new Strategic Investments Law intended to evaluate and select transportation projects based on the benefits in an attempt to stop a rail transit project that’s already been selected for state funds. The unknown legislators’ action to insert a provision cutting the state commitment to a Durham-Chapel Hill light rail link from $138 million down to $500,000. drew wide condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, members of both parties and even legislators that also don’t like this particular project.

Early this morning, the North Carolina legislature adjourned their session without approving an amendment to remove that cap, leaving the state funds for the project in limbo for now. The House successfully passed an amendment to remove the cap by a large margin, but the Senate did not vote on it and referred it to committee, ending any chance to deal with it until the legislature reconvenes in April 2016, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

The project is rolling forward for now with it’s environmental impact statement, and the GoTriangle transit agency is optimistic that the cap can be removed in the next session after such a strong showing in the State House.

All of this damages an improved process that was supposed to remove this kind of political maneuvering from deciding which projects are funded and which are not. From McClatchy via Mass Transit Mag:

[Durham Senator Mike] Woodard mentioned how well the Durham-Orange Light Rail line scored with the strategic transportation investments law (STI). The STI created a formula using “data-driven scoring and local input” to help determine what projects would get funding through the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP). … “There are certainly Senate members who are not fans of transit,” McKissick said, adding members believe that politics have been put “right in the middle” of the discussion and debate of public transportation. McKissick said funding through STIP was a way to remove politics from the process.

Earlier this week, we included testimony from North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who was proudly touting his state’s new process for evaluating transportation projects before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. His later exchange with Rep. Crawford is worth reading in full:

Representative Crawford: Your State took on a pretty big change in your transportation project selection process. What prompted you to do that? Talk about that a little bit.

Governor McCrory. Well, we were making a lot of decisions on our roadbuilding based upon politics. And as you went down, we did not have the interconnectivity that we should have had. You would go down from the East to the West, North to the South, and we would have highways going from two lanes to four lanes back to two lanes back to eight lanes. And it made no rhyme or reason on why the roads were wide in one area and very narrow in others. And we also saw that it was not an efficient use of limited tax dollars. So in a bipartisan agreement, Republicans and Democrats both agreed to change that formula. …We now base our formula on how we spend money on congestion, on economic opportunity, and on safety, the three major criteria of how we decide to spend the money.

Rep. Crawford: Safe to say that it has been pretty well received by the general public on that transparency and the streamlining the process, taking the politics out?

Gov. McCrory: Absolutely. And I think where I keep bringing up Eisenhower, for each of you, too, is I think as we look for more funding, Mr. Chairman, we need to also show the vision of where we plan to have this interconnectivity from a national perspective, from a regional perspective, from a State perspective, and even, yes, to a local perspective. If we show that, where we are planning to spend that money, and show that we do have a plan and a vision for the next generation and the generation after that, I think people are willing to pay for it. But if we do not have their trust and spend the money as we have always spent it, I do not think we are going to get the trust of the people to increase the amount of funding for transportation.

We’ll keep our eye on this issue over the next year, as will the members of the Raleigh delegation to this year’s Transportation Innovation Academy as they continue advancing plans to bring other new transit service to adjacent Wake County.