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North Carolina
Highway Robbery- Part 2
By Fern Shubert
Anyone who thinks road money in North Carolina is spent based on public need obviously hasn’t traveled around the state to see the vast disparities in road conditions. Not surprisingly, given the fondness of the press for the insiders who currently control Raleigh, most papers have managed to ignore the mess the insiders have made of the highway funding process.
When Senate Democrats slipped a provision in the 2001 Technical Corrections Act to take Highway Funds in unlimited quantities (whatever the party planners needed) to fund the First Flight Celebration, House Republicans caught the attempt to give a blank check to transfer road funds and got it removed. Did anyone bother to tell the public who tried to pull a fast one and got caught? Did they expose the leadership that thought weasel-wording a provision to make its meaning obscure and hiding it in a bill that was supposed to be a housekeeping bill with no substantive provisions was acceptable behavior? Did they point out that even though we managed to get rid of the blank check, the provisions requiring DOT to take over cemetery maintenance for selected counties remained in the bill? Didn’t see the article, did you?
When the papers recently reported the Department of Transportation’s plan to reallocate funds away from every western highway district and all but one Piedmont district to increase funding in every district on the coast, the press didn’t even question the fairness of the plan. (Come to think of it, when the rules on paving unpaved roads were changed so that the counties with no more roads to pave could keep getting the paving money, I didn’t see that reported either.)
I did question the reallocation, because I couldn’t understand how the counties with the worst roads that had been getting the least funding could have been getting more than their share. When I asked Secretary of Transportation Tippett the basis for the transfer, I was given a one page spread sheet that compares funding by region since 1999-2000 to the so-called equity formula.
In the first place the formula is ridiculously inequitable. This is not just my opinion. As former DOT Board Member Frank Johnson said after being kicked off the Board for telling the truth in public, “Shakespeare said ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ The ‘equity’ formula used to distribute money in the state of NC by any other name would stink to the high heavens.” In other words, the “equity formula” is very unfair. Why isn’t it discussed?
In the second place, why look at such a limited snapshot? Selective use of numbers is an old accounting trick that should have been challenged by anyone who knows any math.
In the third place, given the way DOT invented a need for the Moving On initiative to distribute a surplus of highway funds they discovered right before the last election and then discovered after the election that they were short of money, why would anyone take their numbers at face value?
A few years ago the papers took on the issue of corruption in DOT. A few of the underlings were thrown to the wolves, but there were no changes at the top of the pyramid. Now there is a new slush fund scandal. If the press will take a look, there are a lot more underlings who need to be sacrificed to protect their friends at the top. Better yet, maybe the press could start going after some of the people at the top.
As noted in my first Highway Robbery column, DOT insiders acknowledge the graft and corruption that exists. Even the general public is catching on to the fact that roads are built based on political pull rather than public need. The big money isn’t in minor graft; it is in contract fraud and cover-up and in using insider knowledge to make big money in real-estate development. Oh, and let’s not forget selling public benefits (like jobs and appointments and grants) for political contributions.
But since all the press is talking about so far are the slush funds that have become public knowledge, let me highlight a story that sums up the insider attitude. Elizabeth City was given $250,000 of state highway funds for beautification of a street that is not even part of the state highway system and has been promised an additional quarter of a million dollars for the project. Representative Bill Owens defended the spending by saying, "If you don't have (discretionary funds), then some things go strictly on a priority list, and there's some that are not getting done.”
He’s right, of course. That’s the whole idea of priorities.
It’s a pleasure to see the press finally report a fraction of what’s happening with roads. Perhaps this time they could take the time to trace the problem to its source, a broken legislative process, rather than settling for stories about the small change items.
1-Policy Report No. 27 – Road & Track; By Michael Lowrey and Jonathan
C. Jordan; John Locke Foundation; March 1999
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