Firings over toll screwups

In California and Massachusetts top officials got fired this month for two mismanaged toll projects. In Boston Paul Cellucci, the state governor fired James Kerasiotes from his job as head of the Mass Turnpike following a USDOT committee report on the $1.4b of new cost overruns at the Big Dig. The mismanagement of this project is so egregious noone seems to be arguing with the governor’s action. Yet you have to wonder if Kerasiotes isn’t being made to take the rap for a scandal much larger than any one person. He and others were found to have “intentionally withheld” information about the vast cost escalation.

The companies at the center of the Big Dig fiasco are starting to feel a little heat too. FHWA’s chief counsel has been asked to review evidence of complicity in the coverup by the Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff joint venture, and their possible debarment from federally aided projects. And the Mass Turnpike and the state’s highway department are now listed by USDOT as “High risk” grantees. Sadly none of this will probably change anything much.. So long as these projects are run by governments there will continue to be a systemic lack of accountability. The government’s costs are the contractor’s profits.

Meanwhile in Sacramento, Governor Gray Davis sacked his sec of transp Jose Medina over his mishandling of 91-Express (91X). Some press accounts have said that Medina was fired for settling the laws suit with 91X under which Caltrans would hold off construction of extra lanes on the CA-91 until 2006. We thought Caltrans was proposing far more extra lane than was justified for safe merging, and that the owners of 91X, CPTC, had a good case in law that Caltrans was breaching its no-free capacity enhancement commitments under the 91X franchise. In that event Medina was merely agreeing to a compromise, probably as much as Caltrans could have got in a protracted court case.

However Medina never attempted to explain his decision to agree to the transfer of the 91X franchise to Newtrac, the contrived not-for-profit that he approved, or the use of the state infrastructure bank in this dubious deal - which unraveled in a political firestorm. The franchises were granted and structured around for-profit entities with clear lines of accountability, but politicians whose business is favor-trading find it difficult to leave alone.