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DOT audit casts shadow on road funding decisions

Department says it needs money, but shakeup comes first

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The negative impact of a critical state Department of Transportation audit is growing.

The department's commission last week decided to delay widening U.S. 17 between Gardens Corner and Jacksonboro because it doesn't have enough money for the job.

The department's most recent accountability report showed that it has a backlog in road and bridge repairs of $3 billion a year.

But with the Legislative Audit Council concluding that the department has wasted millions of dollars, the department will be hard pressed to get a sympathetic hearing from state legislators. No lawmaker is likely to want to increase the agency's funding without a major overhaul, and that will take time. Gov. Mark Sanford wants the agency under his control under his government restructuring proposal.

And the news out of the audit only gets worse. This week, department staff members testified at a Senate Transportation subcommittee meeting that that the agency's management ordered cash balances to be manipulated in 2004 to hide money from lawmakers, something the agency's executive director, Elizabeth Mabry, has denied. Mabry is on sick leave until the end of the month.

Comptroller Angela Feaster and deputy state highway engineer John Walsh told the subcommittee that they both participated in a December 2003 meeting at which plans were made to delay payments from the federal government totaling $78 million and to defer billing on more than $100 million on other projects, the Greenville News reported. The two said the orders came from officials worried that South Carolina lawmakers might do what legislators in other states had done at the time and take surplus highway money.

Although we don't condone such duplicity, who's to say department officials weren't right to worry about that? Legislators have raided trust funds set up for specific uses and gotten the state into a financial bind by funding ongoing expenses with one-time money.

Here is the sad pass we have come to. We can trust neither state agencies nor lawmakers to make decisions based on where the money is most needed. Politics play too large a role.

The $223 million U.S. 17 project is a case in point. The highway department sought a $48 million loan and a $90 milllion grant for the project from the State Infrastructure Bank. But the Infrastructure Bank only offered a $93 million loan, choosing instead to fund projects in Horry, Charleston and Aiken counties to the tune of $174 million. It left $126 million in the bank. That decision came after bank committee members rated the U.S. 17 project its top priority due to safety concerns.

The $93 million loan would allow the department to start on the first six miles of the 22-mile project, but the department said it was $2.6 million a year short in being able to pay back the loan. (To review, the Legislative Audit Council identified more than $50 million the agency had wasted through poorly written contracts and mismanagement. It also concluded that the department's decision to delay getting federal reimbursements may have cost the state $1.5 million in interest.)

Commission chairman Tee Hooper's request at last week's commission meeting that department staff compile a list of highway projects ranked by engineering, safety or other needs -- and not politics -- brought objections from one commissioner. The "voice of the people" would be cut out.

But the "people" aren't being helped much by the process as it is.

For their part, lawmakers refuse to raise the state's gasoline tax, which has stagnated at 16 cents a gallon since 1987. State highway officials say greater fuel efficiency and less driving because of higher gasoline prices has resulted in gasoline tax revenue leveling off. It can't keep up with demand.

The bottom line: There has to be a better way to get highways built and maintained in this state.