Mike Hubbard: Commission would elevate state's highway projects

A recent study by a conservative think tank tracked the performance and cost effectiveness of state owned roads across America between 1984 and 2005. Among the data studied in each state were pavement condition, bridge condition, administrative costs, traffic fatalities and other factors.

Not surprisingly, Alabama ranked a dismal 43rd in the survey.

I believe our poor showing is due largely to our state’s history of constructing road projects based upon politics, not priorities, and making infrastructure decisions based upon short term political needs rather than long term planning.

The capitol is full of stories about road projects being handed out like candy to cooperative legislators during the Wallace and Folsom years. There are an equal number of stories detailing road projects that were begun under one administration only to be abandoned, unfinished, when another administration with a different set of supporters to reward, took office. The tradition of trading road projects for legislative votes was so strong that Don Siegelman’s transportation director had his own satellite office in the Alabama State House just two floors below the Legislature. During close votes on especially controversial issues, such as Siegelman’s lottery legislation, lawmakers would burn up the elevators making deals for projects back home.

Gov. Bob Riley and his transportation director, Joe McInnes, injected the department with an air of integrity and a new perspective when they took office in 2003.

McInnes closed the director’s office in the State House and returned to the ALDOT building, and Riley publicly pledged he would never gather legislative votes by offering transportation dollars. In the five years since, not one story has been written nor one claim made that he has ever broken that promise.

To ensure that future governors do not return to the unseemly and corrupt practices of the past, Riley has proposed legislation that would remove the Transportation Department from the governor’s hands and place it under an independent commission of appointed members. Serving staggered terms of six years each, the commissioners, not the governor, would select the transportation director and the five-member group would decide which road and bridge priorities were greatest.

All of our neighboring states have successfully used similar commissions to reduce politics in paving, and many Alabama state agencies, such as the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the State Docks and others, are operated under a commission independent of the governor.

State Rep. Cam Ward (R—Alabaster) has introduced the commission legislation each of the last several years and has guided it safely through the House three times, only to watch it die in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Earlier this month, Rep. Ward found his bill before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and, along with McInnes, explained to the panel why the commission approach is good, sound public policy. They pointed to the examples in other states and stressed the need to put planning before politics.

Their arguments, however, fell upon deaf Democrat ears as all but one of the Democrats on the committee voted to kill the bill while all three Republican members voted in favor. The bill failed by a 6-4 margin.

Situations such as this occur far too often in Montgomery.

When given the choice between honest, conservative change or more of the same corrupt system that has existed for years, Democrats in the Legislature choose more of the same. When offered to put the public good ahead of their political greed, House and Senate Democrats fail the test every time.

Rep. Mike Hubbard (R-Auburn) represents District 79 in the Alabama Legislature and is the House Minority Leader. He also serves as Chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.