2nd UPDATE
Mike Evans: Speaker Offered Me A Job To Get Out Of DOT Race

Update at 2 p.m. adds additional quote from Evans. New material highlighted.
Update at 1:43 p.m. adds additional material.

By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(1/25/08) DOT Board Chairman Mike Evans said Friday that House Speaker Glenn Richardson offered him a job as lobbyist for the Department of Transportation if he would surrender quietly and not contest his push to dump him from the board. Richardson described it at the time as “an easy way out for everybody," said Evans - one of two DOT board members with targets on their backs in the upcoming legislative caucus elections. He said he rejected the offer.

“It’s obvious to me he doesn’t have the votes,” Evans said in an interview with InsiderAdvantage. “Last week he offered me a job to get out of the race, and yesterday he spends the better part of his time in the press club trying to rouse up ... (opposition.) If he had the votes, he wouldn’t mention Mike Evans’ name.”

Clelia Davis, the Speaker’s communications director, said: "Seems like Mike Evans needed a job since he tried to get himself the job of DOT Commissioner."

Evans sided with Gov. Sonny Perdue during a vote by the board last October to elect Gena Abraham as the new transportation commissioner. Richardson and a number of his top House colleagues were siding with Rep. Vance Smith, a popular legislator who is chairman of the House Transportation Committee. (Earlier in the process, Evans had been mentioned as a possible compromise candidate as DOT commissioner. House leaders contend he was using the process to help himself. He contends that was not the case..)

Five DOT board members are up for election this year in the legislative caucuses which choose them. Two of the five - Evans, who represents the 9th District, and Raybon Anderson of the 12th - sided with the governor and, therefore, are on the endangered list.

While Evans is the primary target, Anderson, too, is said to be facing serious problems, and there is talk that Richardson may team with Democrats to oust him. His only opponents so far are Democrats.

At the Atlanta Press Club on Thursday, Richardson blamed the DOT board for not blowing the whistle sooner on new revelations that the previous commissioner committed state dollars that he didn’t have in the bank to numerous local road projects.

He particularly singled out Chairman Mike Evans. “I have a little bit of a problem with the chairman of the board because I don’t believe the problems we have today just happened overnight,” he said. “He’s been chairman now for a couple of years. Somebody’s got to be held accountable for the fact that there’s no money.”

Also, he said: “From what I understand, from my reports from the new commissioner, we have no money. Hundreds, thousands of projects that have been promised to communities have no money. Yet only a few weeks ago, members of the state Transportation Board were parading around the state with big plastic checks showing money they were going to give to communities because they wanted to preserve their jobs - and there was no money behind those checks ... Those transportation dollars and all those projects were approved by that board. And it’s time for accountability.”

News reports at the time showed Mike Evans was one of those distributing the plastic signs.

“There have been billions of dollars spent and billions of dollars promised and there’s no money there to build transportation projects. I want to know why someone didn’t say something about this before two weeks ago. Why has it been hidden and why didn’t the board in charge of that know that,” Richardson said.

But Evans said Friday he’s been leading the charge for change at the DOT and he pointed to the website he ordered DOT staffers to create to show the state’s shortfall, along with a number of other steps, including letters he said he wrote to Richardson.

“The thought that I haven’t been leading the charge for change over the last year and a half is ludicrous,” he said. “To go back and rewrite history - that’s essentially what Glenn Richardson did yesterday in hopes of getting rid of me because he didn’t get his way - is preposterous to anyone who knows what I’ve been doing as DOT chairman.”

He added: “If Glenn Richardson wants to debate me about my hiring of Gena Abraham to run the department or what I’ve done at the department and the things I’ve done to lead the charge on reforming that department, I’d be glad to do that with him any time, any place.”

Evans said that Vance Smith called him last week to say he had just stepped out of the Speaker’s office and they wanted to offer him the DOT lobbyist job from which Jimmy Benefield is retiring. It was conditioned on him getting out of the race, he said. The job pays in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year.

"The way I got it, he would put his arm around me, say what a great job I'd do, how much I knew about DOT and the relationships I had," Evans said.

“Later on that night, I saw Glenn at a bankers’ reception. I walked over to him. He brought it up then. He said, ‘I thought this might be an easy way out for everybody.’”