Drama at DOT: Roads to somewhere?
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(12/25/08) The rumor mill is alive and well after Governor Sarah Palin rolled out her FY2010 budget. Most of the rumors center around the proposed budget at the Department of Transportation and the growing rift over what the department sees are transportation priorities and what the governor sees as political priorities.
On December 16, I received an email from a source who stated that DOT officials were miffed after having their list of projects rejected by the governor who instead wanted to go her own way.
On December 21, Juneau based economist Gregg Erickson touched on the rift in his column in the Anchorage Daily News:
Gov. Sarah Palin also caught the spoor of massive federal project handouts, but -- to the chagrin of road builders at the state Dept. of Transportation and Public Facilities -- she directed officials to focus all the state's efforts on getting a massive federal subsidy for the TransCanada gas pipeline.
On December 23, I received a CC of an email to a lawmaker from a local government official who has asked the legislature look into the situation.
The interview excerpt below appears to confirm various media and other reports that, unlike other states, the governor is limiting requests for federal economic stimulus funds, in our case to a few transportation projects which are directly related to the gasline.
I have heard also that DOT has been told not to submit a number of projects (including some that might be supported by legislators and their constituent communities) because they are non-gasline-related.
So this results in at least 2 concerns: First, if all the money goes to the state, and the administration has limited its request to a narrow type of project, no funds will flow to local communities for local projects.
Second, if DOT is not being allowed to provide a statewide list of projects beyond the 3 or 4 submitted, Alaska may miss a big opportunity to receive an appropriate share of federal funding, especially at a time when state revenues are declining. From my perspective, this is not the time to thanks but no thanks.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29994
On December 24, I received another email from a another DOT source who was a little more direct about the political fall out from the disagreements between DOT and the governor's office regarding road projects:
This drama between Palin and DOT gets more interesting. I hear now that Palin is on a witch hunt and the several high level folks at DOT may lose their job. She wants to know who leaked the story about her reduced project list for economic recovery funds to the News Miner a month or so ago.
What is so top secret about the project list that DOT generated and the one she sent to the feds? What is she hiding?
And finally, this came from yet another source on December 24:
Can you find out what the "confidential" list of ready-to-construct transportation projects that Palin submitted to the feds recently? It's a big secret at DOT and very few know.
Rumor is that the state identified many, many projects several months ago when a call for the list came in. But for political reasons Palin only turned in a "fraction" of the projects to the Feds for the economic stimulus funding that they expect Obama to sign.
Rumor is that for political reasons she only submitted a fraction of our transportation projects that are ready to go. And what those projects are is a really big secret.
Meanwhile, sources on Capitol Hill say they are unaware of any proposed list or ask from the State to the Feds for specific projects for the economic stimulus funds.
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