Road building should be based on need, not politics

THE RECENT AUDIT of the state Transportation Department brought to light all sorts of disturbing problems with how the agency manages money on the projects it pursues, and that is producing the type of debate that we’ve needed but haven’t had since the Legislature broke apart the huge, autonomous agency rather than actually reforming it in the early ’90s.

But as the chairman reminded us when the agency’s governing board met Tuesday, there are equally important questions about whether the agency is making the right decisions when it comes to selecting projects.

At the Transportation Commission’s first meeting since the highly critical audit was released last month, Chairman Tee Hooper made the following modest request of the agency’s engineers: Prepare a list of the state’s top road and bridge projects based only on engineering criteria. For the uninitiated, that means leave out the political favoritism.

It’s hard to imagine that no such list exists. Even Richland County, which is famous for paving roads based solely on politics, has a priority list that’s based purely on quantifiable criteria such as traffic volume. The County Council simply refuses to adhere to that list, or even to require public votes to depart from it, for instance when a council member wants the road she lives on to be paved ahead of 161 projects deemed more critical.

But at the Transportation Department, the thought of even having such a list apparently is insulting — or threatening — to some commissioners. The Greenville News reports that Mr. Hooper’s request was met with objections from fellow commissioner Marion Carnell, a former House member, “who lectured Hooper on the importance of residents’ voices being represented.”

“Here you are wanting to cut off the voice of the people,” Mr. Carnell told the chairman, covering cronysim in populist gift wrap.

As offensive as we should all consider Mr. Carnell’s rebuke, it did have the beneficial effect of illustrating the self-perpetuating problem: Decisions about which roads and bridges get built or repaired are based on politics. The Transportation Department is able to operate this way because it is an independent island in state government, completely free from any meaningful accountability for its management or its decisions. It is able to maintain its autonomy because of its ability to keep legislators happy by doling out road and bridge projects like Christmas trinkets. And it will remain an unaccountable political fiefdom as long as our legislators place more value on collecting those trinkets than on making sure we direct our limited resources to our greatest needs.

Mr. Hooper asked merely that we have a standard by which to judge how closely his fellow commissioners’ spending decisions match up to our state’s actual, documented needs. Not that the commission actually be required to follow that list — merely that it exist. The fact that a member of the commission could object to that request and not in turn be rebuked by the rest of the board seems ample evidence that the Transportation Commission is incapable of responsibly governing the Transportation Department.