Harvey Peeler

by Senator Harvey Peeler

As the old saying goes, “When everybody is in charge, no one is in charge.”

It’s true in business, it’s true in government – and it’s never been truer than it is at the state Department of Transportation right now, where an unaccountable seven-member commission controls everything from traffic lights to curb cuts.

And while the members of the DOT Commission swap favors and horse trade to get roads built in their neck of the woods, highways that are in desperate need of attention – like I-85 right here in our area – continue to get neglected.

The DOT is broken, and needs fixing. Here’s why:

First of all, the DOT Commission has become a favor factory rather than a functioning board. There are seven members on the Commission, which means four votes control the spending. In other words, as long as those four scratch each others’ backs and make sure their pet projects get taken care, the rest of the DOT Commissioners, including ours, might as well not even show up.

If you’re looking for proof, you don’t have to drive anywhere further than a few exits up or down I-85. We have “see-through” bridges just miles from our homes with more holes than swiss cheese. In Cowpens on Exit 83, the exit is in such bad disrepair that you have to drive through the parking lot of Mountain View Baptist Church to get back onto the Interstate.

Just drive over the state line in either direction, and you can see a very different Interstate 85. In Georgia and North Carolina, they’ve made I-85 a priority. They’ve recognized the vital role in economic development it plays for the Charlotte and Atlanta regions.

Meanwhile, our DOT treats I-85 like an afterthought. What is the DOT’s priority, instead? An interstate that hasn’t even been built yet, and may never wind up being built. I-73, which is supposed to go from Detroit to Myrtle Beach, will cost our state more than $1 Billion just to reach the North Carolina line.

Now I’m no expert, but the times I’ve been to Myrtle Beach and looked around at the license plates, it didn’t seem to me like folks from Michigan and Ohio are having any trouble getting here.

But four DOT Commissioners teamed up to ignore the rest of the state’s interests, and ignore the critical needs that already exist across our state.

According to the DOT, one third of our roads are in “poor” or “mediocre” condition. Over 3,000 bridges are in need of repair, ranging from being rated “substandard” to “functionally obsolete.” All told, there’s a 20 year backlog of maintenance needs. I-73 didn’t even make the cut for the list of the most critical statewide road projects that the DOT commission itself prioritized.

Adding insult to injury, the decision to go forward with the I-73 boondoggle tied up pretty much all of the state’s borrowing power to address these needs. It’d be a like a farmer taking his life savings to buy a new Corvette when the wheels are falling off the tractor. But that’s what happens when “everyone is in charge.”

To make matters even worse (yes, it gets worse), the DOT can’t even pay the bills that it owes. They recently had to ask the Obama administration for emergency funds because they didn’t have enough cash flow to pay some of the contractors already working across the state.

It’s a broken system, and I’m determined to fix it.

We’ve got to get rid of this Commission who treats our roads agency like a swap meet. Instead of letting politics drive our infrastructure decisions, they need be made based on objective criteria and rankings. We need to make upkeep and maintenance a priority before we even start talking about new roads. It’s like the first thing you tell your kids when they start asking for a new toy – not until you learn to take care of what you’ve got!

Most importantly, we need to make sure someone is in charge. The buck has to stop somewhere when things go wrong at the DOT, and what better place for it to stop than right at the top, the Governor’s Office. That’s not to say this governor or future governor’s are always going to make the right decisions – any governor is going to make good and bad decisions. But the problem with DOT right now is that no one knows WHO is making the decisions, and that’s the first thing that needs to change.

We’ve got to restructure the agency so it’s accountable to the people it serves, and it’s a fight I’ll continue to lead.