Road runners.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: North Carolina's highway construction policy reform

It's been a decade since antitrust crackdowns flushed out the bid-rigging schemes that plagued North Carolina road building for years.

"I'm a convicted felon," says DeWitt Hodges, president of Propst Construction Co. of Concord, which was fined $1 million 10 years ago for rigging highway bids. "If you were in highway construction, you didn't know any other way to do business then." Now, the political power-brokering that rushed into the vacuum left by the demise of bid rigging may also be on the road to oblivion. Gov. Jim Hunt says he's going to depoliticize the Department of Transportation. Out with its horse-and-buggy obsession with new roads, he says, and in with an urbanized concept of good highways augmented by mass transit.

All that stands in his way is a highway lobby that spends an estimated $10 million a year wooing legislators, a $9.2 billion 1989 Highway Trust Fund for the purpose of building new roads and a tradition of putting political cronies with significant land holdings in charge of setting transportation priorities.

Hunt's predecessor, former Gov. James Martin, calls reform efforts "malarkey" and says his goal of building four-lane roads within 10 miles of 96% of the population was so popular it got him re-elected.

Well, Gov. Hunt, nobody said it would be easy.

When it comes to priorities for transportation, politics has always been in the driver's seat. Policy is set by the Board of Transportation, 22 of whose 24 members are appointed by the governor and whose will is carried out by the DOT's 14,000 employees. (The House speaker and lieutenant governor each have one appointment.)

Getting a seat on the board has been a pay-to-play proposition: Of 103 members since 1977, 96 were white males who gave $1,000 or more to the governor or his party, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported.

Fifty-six board members appointed by Martin and his lieutenant governor, Jim Gardner, who ran against Hunt last year, donated a total of $3.5 million to the two Republicans' campaigns. The N.C. Board of Ethics said 18 of 22 Martin-Gardner appointees had potential conflicts of interest concerning some DOT issues.

It's too early to say if Hunt will push for significant change. After all, during his first two terms as governor during 1977-85, he wasn't shy about using his influence to get roads built. This time around, though, he's talking about a new vision. "Transportation plays a key role in economic development," he said when he named former...