Streetsblog Capitol Hill

States do a poor job safeguarding against corruption, according to a recent report from the Center for Public Integrity. The list above ranks state ethical protections in descending order. The green states received "B" grades; yellow ones got "C"s; orange ones earned a "D"s and the red ones failed. Image: Center for Public Integrity

Last week we looked at three state DOTs which are currently led by former lobbyists for the asphalt or energy industries. The “Revolving Door” series highlighted how billions in federal funding for transportation get funneled, with no oversight, to states where money and politics corrupt policy and lead to shocking amounts of waste.

While it’s outrageous that a state DOT chief can flit back and forth between lobbying gigs and the public sector, or dole out enormous contracts designed to benefit the governor’s political benefactors, such antics aren’t limited to the three states we profiled. For a good survey of the lax ethics rules that prevail in most American statehouses (affecting not just transportation but all aspects of state policy), check out the Center for Public Integrity’s State Integrity Investigation.

CPI’s recent analysis found that loose state ethics rules and oversight are the norm, not the exception, in state capitals around the country. The group graded all 50 states, and not a single one scored an A. Only five states managed Bs. The rest were all mediocre-to-abysmal.

The three states Streetsblog examined — Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma — received Ds for overall ethics oversight and transparency.

The report found that, across the country, state-level ethics protections are weak, and where they do exist, they often lack teeth.

Tennessee, for example, started a state ethics commission six years ago, but has yet to issue a single citation.

Notably, in CPI’s investigation, Ohio, Texas and Oklahoma all rated below 50 percent — a failing grade — on “regulating conflicts of interest by the executive branch” — the rules and oversight that would apply to state DOT directors.

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This is the final installment in our three-part “Revolving Door” series about how cronyism in state DOTs leads to wasteful highway building. The first part profiled Ohio DOT chief Jerry Wray and the second part looked at Oklahoma DOT boss Gary Ridley. Both Wray and Ridley left the DOTs to work as asphalt industry lobbyists, only to return to the public sector later on. 

This edition of our Revolving Door series features TxDOT Director Phil Wilson, whose chief qualification for leading the $10 billion-a-year agency seems to be not his transportation or administrative expertise, but his cozy relationship with the governor.

TxDOT Chief Phil Wilson has had a long, mutually beneficial relationship with Texas Governor Rick Perry. Photo: The Austin Statesman

Wilson has held half a dozen public offices under Texas Governor Rick Perry, including secretary of state and personal communications director. While Wilson was serving as the governor’s deputy chief of staff, in 2006, he helped set in motion a “public private partnership” on wind energy that cost taxpayers a bundle, but offered some personal benefits to both him and the governor. We relay this anecdote, even though it doesn’t directly relate to transportation, because it speaks to the level of cronyism and deal-making that Wilson brings to the office of state-wide transportation commissioner in the second most-populous state in the union.

As a member of the governor’s cabinet, Wilson recommended the state pay for the construction of utility lines from wind farms in the western part of Texas to the more populous eastern half. He estimated the deal would cost Texas taxpayers a few hundred million dollars. But according to a report from Texans for Public Justice [PDF], when contracts were awarded in 2009 the price had ballooned to $5 billion.

By then, Wilson had left the Perry administration to work as vice president and lobbyist for the energy company Luminant, one of the country’s largest wind energy buyers. Between 2008 and 2011, Phil Wilson reported he received between $250,000 and $470,000 in total compensation as a lobbyist for Luminant, according to Texans for Public Justice. (In Texas, lobbyists report their wages in ranges.) Meanwhile, Wilson helped Texas Energy Future Holdings, the parent company of Luminant, win the biggest utility line contract, for a cool $1.3 billion, TPJ reported.

At the same time, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, Luminant was stepping up to help ensure Rick Perry’s reelection. The company donated $633,575 to the governor’s campaign fund from 2001 to 2011. Last year, the whole thing came full circle when Perry welcomed Wilson back into public service. Wilson was appointed by Perry to head TxDOT, making him the first non-engineer ever to hold the position. The Texas media criticized the appointment, calling Wilson a “political hack” with a thin resume. Terri Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Freedom and Reform, called the move “flaming pay-to-play cronyism.”

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This is the second installment in our three-part “Revolving Door” series about how cronyism in state DOTs leads to wasteful highway building. The first part profiled Ohio DOT chief Jerry Wray, who has switched back and forth between working directly for the asphalt industry and shoveling money to the asphalt industry as a public official.

Like Jerry Wray, Oklahoma DOT Director Gary Ridley has split his career between public office and lobbying on behalf of the asphalt industry. He started out in the mid-1960s, working as an equipment officer for the DOT. He climbed several rungs on the ladder and then left in 1997 to lead the Oklahoma Asphalt Paving Association, before returning to the department in 2001 as director of operations. In 2009, he was appointed to the top position in the agency.

As head of ODOT, Gary Ridley, a former asphalt lobbyist, helped destroy a rail yard that had been prepared for redevelopment. Photo: News on 6

The Oklahoma Asphalt Pavement Association made $3,000 in contributions to Governor Brad Henry’s reelection campaign in 2006, three years before Ridley’s appointment, and then donated $1,000 to the campaign of current Governor Mary Fallin in 2010. She had reappointed Ridley shortly after her confirmation.

Those are pretty small amounts in the world of political campaign money. But there are a lot of cozy ties between the road lobby and top politicians in Oklahoma, and Ridley is deeply embedded in the state’s industry-friendly culture. One of Ridley’s predecessors as ODOT director, Neal McCaleb, also worked as a lobbyist for the road industry, sandwiched between two terms as transportation secretary. McCaleb, reportedly a close political ally of Ridley, is now president of a road lobbying group called Transportation Revenues Used Strictly for Transportation. (TRUST — get it?)

Upon Ridley’s reappointment, McCaleb, acting as a representative of TRUST, called him the “best transportation director in the state’s history.” Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, one of the chief architects of the new transportation bill, MAP-21, went further, calling Ridley “the best secretary of transportation in the country.” Inhofe, a well-known climate change denier, is a political darling of the oil and gas industry and fervent opponent of federal programs that support biking and walking.

Sure enough, Inhofe trotted Ridley out to testify before Congress on behalf of the more backwards proposals for the transportation bill last July. His testimony was a direct appeal to exempt states from requirements to invest in biking and walking:

This country’s CORE infrastructure is in a deplorable condition. Therefore, we support the ability for States to carefully scrutinize, prioritize and direct transportation funding that may be available for peripheral projects and programs.

Programs that mandate the commitment of dedicated transportation funding to recreational and fringe activities such as bicycle and pedestrian trails, complete streets, landscaping and historic preservation should be vigorously reviewed. If community livability projects and other similar programs are determined to be critically important to the viability and prosperity of the Nation, other funding mechanisms should be identified and the programs should be funded separately from core transportation infrastructure.

Tom Elmore, executive director of the Oklahoma City-based North American Transportation Institute, said it is an open secret that ODOT is focused as much, if not more, on serving the highway lobby as the people of the Sooner State. He calls Ridley “the P.E. with no degree,” since Ridley does not have a college degree, but was awarded a certificate as a Professional Engineer because he passed a test. (The same test is no longer sufficient for the credential.)

“ODOT and the highway lobby are one and the same,” Elmore said. “It’s very difficult to tell these days who is working for ODOT and who is working for the contractors because there is a such a revolving door.”

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One of the top goals of the national transportation reform movement is to get state DOTs to spend their money more wisely. The feds distribute tens of billions of dollars to state DOTs each year with very few strings attached. But for every state like Massachusetts or Tennessee that’s decided to shift toward building walkable streets and away from highway construction, there are plenty of state DOTs that continue to build very expensive, sprawl-inducing roads, even though they can’t afford to maintain what they already have.

ODOT Director Jerry Wray, a career-long friend of asphalt. Photo: Toledo Blade

In many states, big decisions about how to spend money have less to do with the actual public benefits of a given project than the rewards that accrue to elected officials. With billions of dollars at stake, transportation departments can be used to reward favored constituencies or to achieve other political goals. Witness Birmingham’s $4.7 billion zombie highway, which won’t do much besides line the pockets of politically-connected companies. Or how about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s decision in 2010 to kill the ARC rail tunnel connection to New York’s Penn Station, which threw away years of preparation so Christie could win national attention from movement conservatives and appeal to his suburban base by diverting the funds to roadbuilding.

Sometimes transportation decisions amount to little more than cronyism, which is never more obvious than when a governor hires an industry lobbyist to run his state DOT. For this series, which we’re calling “The Revolving Door,” Streetsblog looked at three states where governors have gone so far as to put a lobbyist for the roadbuilding or energy industries in charge of transportation policy.

To kick off the Revolving Door series, we’re taking a look at Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jerry Wray, nicknamed the “asphalt sheriff,” who managed to sandwich a lobbying position at an asphalt industry group in between his two terms as ODOT head.

“ODOT is a machine for the road contractors. Everything that they do is intended to produce more gas tax revenue so there can be more revenue for ODOT.”

- Ken Prendergast, All Aboard Ohio

Wray first filled ODOT’s top office under Republican Governor George Voinovich in the 1990s, when he was often accused of favoring the asphalt industry, according to the Columbus Dispatch. After “retiring” from ODOT in 1999, he became vice president of Flexible Pavements of Ohio, an asphalt industry lobbying group. He was then brought back into the public sector when Republican Governor John Kasich took office in 2009. Major road builders like Columbus-based Kokosing Construction and its founder Bill Burgett were among Kasich’s largest donors.

Right away, Wray and Kasich let Ohioans know they had new priorities for the state — the kind of priorities that would certainly please Wray’s former employer. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Kasich said he and Wray shared a similar philosophy on transportation: namely, a deeply partisan obsession with obstructing the state’s passenger rail plans — the “3C” train service connecting Columbus, Cincinnati, and Columbus Cleveland that the Obama administration had pledged $400 million to start up. “His people that he will bring on will understand: no games, no politics, no train,” Kasich said of Wray. Killing the train — which would have cost the state a paltry $17 million annually to operate, less than the state currently spends cleaning and maintaining highway rest areas — was Kasich’s first act after being elected.

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