This time, finish DOT reform

It took only the first hearing on the state Department of Transportation for Sen. Larry Grooms to decide that the agency and its commission need major changes. The Senate Transportation Committee should concentrate its efforts on developing a solid legislative plan to bring accountability to the troubled agency.

"If we're hearing that rankings don't matter and priorities don't matter, then we are in a world of trouble," Sen. Grooms said. "We've gone through a great exercise of fixing a hole in the boat and it's sprung wide open and the boat's sinking again."

Sen. Grooms, R-Bonneau, led the Legislature's 2007 reform effort, which made the DOT a Cabinet level agency, and mandated a priority list of road projects to limit political influence in the process.

Unfortunately, the highway commission can ignore the priority list, and did so in its approval of a $344 million bond issue in April. Of the five projects that the bonds would finance, only one is on the state priority list. The bond issue would consume 85 percent of the agency's borrowing capacity.

Meanwhile, agency officials demonstrated their ineptitude by failing to pay contractors on time this summer. Transportation Secretary Robert St. Onge told the committee that the situation was caused in part by "inattentiveness," and not solely by cash-flow problems, as previously stated.

If contractors who depend on the DOT for their bread and butter aren't getting timely payments because of bureaucratic "inattentiveness," then it's time for the agency to make some personnel changes. The DOT will have a hard time making a case for additional funding from the Legislature if its staff can't perform such an essential responsibility.

Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Gaffney, already is pushing for restructuring to bring the agency wholly under the Cabinet system. Policy and projects are currently determined by the highway commission, most of whom are appointed by the legislative delegations in the state's various highway districts.

The commission's plan to give precedence to non-essential projects is evidence enough for Sen. Peeler's plan to go forward.

Those same facts make the case for the Legislative Bond Review Committee to reject the commission's bond plan, when it is presented for approval later this year. Failing that, the state Budget and Control Board should give it the ax.

The question is no longer "if" further reform is needed but just how far the Legislature needs to go.

It's clear that the 2007 reform was a half-measure, and that a wholesale reorganization of the DOT will be required to complete the job.