On Background By Dick Pettys:

DOT Turnaround - If It Succeeds - Could Be Sonny's Legacy

By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(12/17/07) Gov. Sonny Perdue has never seemed comfortable with the word “legacy.”

I found that out toward the end of his very first year in office when I asked him what he hoped to leave as a legacy of his time in office. He quickly took exception to the term, letting me know he thought that legacies were only something that Democratic governors worried about.

“I don't have to have a signature issue for which I'm known,” he said at the time. “Government is a broad array of services and I want to do well in each department."

Maybe I should have used a different phrase and asked him how he wanted people to remember his administration, the real idea behind my question. But apparently enough other people used the same phraseology that he decided to deal with it in his second inaugural speech a few years later. Here’s what he said then:

“ ... The only legacy I seek is the same one any parent or grandparent seeks: to hand off our state, our home, to the next generation in better shape than we found it. This legacy won’t be achieved by executive order or sweeping legislation. This legacy will be the sum of individual actions – it will be the result of Georgians deciding to make a difference ...”

Whether he wants to or not, he will leave a legacy when he walks out of his office for the last time. Every governor does.

And it may be that Perdue’s will be something that’s been right under our noses all along but we just haven’t seen it because it’s been painfully incremental and even at the best of times it is utterly lacking in sex appeal. In fact, it’s absolutely wonkish.

What he’s been doing - as he told us he would - is focusing on the nuts and bolts of how government works and how it can be made to work better.

For instance: According to the governor’s office, wait times for drivers licenses have been reduced from as much as two hours to just seven minutes, we now have a state accounting office that produces more timely and centralized financial reporting and, because we now have a state property officer, we now know exactly what we own in terms of property and land, and where it’s located.

No doubt he’s frustrated from time to time because there’s been little recognition of some of the changes that don’t necessarily touch our lives. Some of that may have to do with the fact that his New Georgia Commission, designed to help him in the task, does its work behind closed doors. That accounts for the blank looks on the faces of reporters when he says this proposal or that recommendation came from the commission.

Be that as it may, this creeping process - or, more importantly, the thought and goal behind it - just might have its biggest payoff in the Department of Transportation, where a woman who shares Perdue’s zeal for making things work better has just taken over as commissioner.

And Gena Abraham, who’s already revamped two agencies for Perdue, found things in disarray at the department.

As we reported last week, when she first tried to find out how many projects were on the books at DOT, the answer came in as 1,100. Then it kept growing and growing and growing until it reached 9,211.

She can’t get a handle on the department’s finances, either, because not all of its accounting systems “talk” to each other. She also doesn’t think anybody’s got a handle on the 1,553 pending lawsuits against the department, and for some reason, she said, the cost estimates of the governor’s Fast Forward road program have zoomed from $3 billion to $5.9 billion.

She took this information to the governor, her board, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, Speaker Glenn Richardson and the press last week, and judging by the initial public response, there’s broad sentiment for fixing an agency that hasn’t had a real shaking up in years.

This leads to some intriguing political questions, given that Abraham’s election as DOT commissioner by the state Transportation Board back in October ruffled some serious feathers. She won 7-6 over state Rep. Vance Smith, the House transportation chairman - a man backed by a rather large number of top House leaders and a good many senators.

The contest pit the Legislature against the governor in a battle that had more implications than it might seem to those who don’t necessarily follow DOT politics because it all boiled down in some minds to a test of whether the Legislature or the governor had the final say over who was to be commissioner.

(Remember, the DOT board is the only one in state government whose members are chosen by legislators in caucuses from each congressional district. So that gives lawmakers something of a proprietary interest in the agency.)

It would be putting it mildly to say that there was a strong lobbying campaign on Smith’s behalf, and that a number of key lawmakers were incensed when the board didn’t vote the way they wanted.

(And this, again, had little to do with either Gena Abraham - who many legislators didn’t know - or Vance Smith, who they did know and like, and who was one of them. It was all about whether the board would listen to the lawmakers who put them into office.)

Now, some of the DOT board members who didn’t vote for Smith - including Board Chairman Mike Evans, a former member of the House - are up for re-election in January and they have big targets on their backs.

There was even some scuttlebutt several months ago about having a new vote for commissioner next year after the Legislature had finished dealing with board members who voted against their wishes. But that died down after a few days and, as far as we know, has not resurfaced.

Enough of the backgrounding. So what does this turmoil at the department portend?

It certainly churns the waters, and if that results in the top leaders of the Legislature giving Abraham their support in making changes, that strengthens her hand. (Remember: the fight wasn’t against her personally, and when she went last week to brief the Speaker and other top House members about what she’d found at DOT so far, she was escorted by none other than Rep. Vance Smith.)

Chairman Evans, who’s identified himself throughout his term as chairman as a man who wants to bring change to the department, might want to cite the troubled times as a reason lawmakers should re-elect him to the board next month so he can help Abraham carry out reforms.

But lawmakers may not see it that way. There was a period during the campaign for the commissioner’s job in which Evans’ own name was floated as a possible compromise candidate instead of either Gena Abraham or Vance Smith. It was a campaign engineered by Evans, himself, lawmakers contend, and they haven’t forgotten - or forgiven.

The turmoil also may impact efforts to pass either a statewide or regional sales tax to help address the huge backlog of road needs in the state. The argument likely would go - until the department gets straightened out, how can it adequately spend more money?

But it was unclear whether transportation funding was even headed to the frontburner this year because of the continuing debate over the Speaker’s plan to reduce property taxes and the competing Senate plans it seems to have spawned. Also, don’t forget that 2008 is an election year and lawmakers would have to be very sure how a tax increase would be received by the voters before they committed to that step.

But let’s assume the politics work themselves out (never a safe assumption among Republicans who still cling to some of their tendencies from their old minority-status days, including their preference to fight among themselves than to do just about anything else.)

And let’s assume the DOT actually does get dragged into the 21st Century and that one person is named to manage a project from start to finish (not the case now), work plans are adjusted to reflect the do-able and aren’t just wish lists, objective criteria are put in place for local road grants (not necessarily the case now), adequate attention is given to mass transit (not the case now, according to Abraham’s findings) and innovative funding programs are undertaken with adequate oversight in place.

Ultimately, that wouldn’t be a bad legacy for any governor to leave, even one who doesn’t necessarily approve of the word “legacy.”