Sewell resigns NCDOT Board under a cloud

Per Greensboro News and Record:

With political pressure mounting, Lewis W. Sewell Jr. had no other choice than to resign from the state Department of Transportation board. Funneling $375,000 for improvements to a highway abutting property he and business partners owned in Jacksonville was a clear, self-serving conflict of interest, not the protocol oversight he claimed.

Caught up in the fallout is Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bev Perdue, who early last week hadn't decided whether to attend a fund-raiser Sewell had planned for her. It ended up being canceled.

Even so, Republican opponent Pat McCrory seized on the controversy to again paint Perdue as being part of the state's entrenched political establishment.

The latest DOT flap should be reason enough to elicit pledges from both candidates to rid the board of partisan political shenanigans.

http://www.news-record.com/content/2008/09/26/article/short_stack_food_for_thought_quick_and_over_easy

Perdue ID's DOT fundraisers

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue followed through on her pledge earlier today and identified Board of Transportation members who are fundraisers for her campaign.

They are Lanny Wilson of Wilmington, Louis Sewell of Jacksonville and Marvin Blount of Greenville. Thomas Betts Jr. of Rocky Mount was previously a board member, but he stepped down last month after a fundraising scandal, Dan Kane reports.

Perdue's campaign also challenged state Treasurer Richard Moore to disclose more than the name of his fundraisers on the board. She wants him to disclose his Wall Street fundraisers, and support a ban on fundraising by those who have business with the treasurer's office.

"Richard Moore says we should ban contributions from DOT board members, but not from people who do business with the Treasurer's office—maybe that's because he’s raised more than $1.5 million from them," said Perdue spokesman David Kochman. "Richard Moore's attacks are the height of hypocrisy."

Moore has said that board members should not be fundraising for the governor.

But his campaign said today that doesn't apply to those who have raised money for Moore in the current campaign—including board members Alan Thornburg and D.M. "Mac" Campbell. Moore could reward them and other fundraisers with board seats, said Moore's campaign manager Jay Reiff, but once on the board they would have to stop fundraising.

"He was going to break that cycle," Reiff said.

Kochman found that stand just as hypocritical. "It's another example of do as I say not as I do," he said.

NC DOT board member resigns over Perdue fundraising

From the Charlotte Observer:

By GARY D. ROBERTSON, Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. - A state Board of Transportation member resigned Friday after his boss questioned his effort to raise campaign money for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beverly Perdue from people connected to a high-profile commercial project in Roanoke Rapids.

Thomas Betts Jr. of Rocky Mount, who represented six northeast Piedmont counties on the board, submitted his resignation to Transportation Secretary Lyndo Tippett. "I have enjoyed my tenure and take much pride in the DOT crew in my division and the good things we have accomplished," Betts wrote in the three-sentence e-mail to Tippett.

Tippett said he talked to Betts about whether Betts had been raising money for Perdue in Roanoke Rapids from people connected to Carolina Crossroads, a new entertainment and retail complex along Interstate 95. The cornerstone of the complex is a theater previously managed by Randy Parton, the brother of Dolly Parton.

Tippett said he was concerned that Carolina Crossroads officials would feel obliged to give to Perdue because the board had approved economic development money for the project. "I told him that it would probably be in the best interest of the state" to step down, Tippett said. "Board members are held to the highest ethical standards. ... we weren't going to accept anything less." Betts didn't return messages left Friday on his cell phone or at his home. Perdue's campaign acknowledged that Betts was helping with a Nov. 13 fundraiser in Rocky Mount but wasn't aware of the efforts to attract Roanoke Rapids donors at this event until Friday.

Betts' resignation embarrasses Perdue, who has made the troubles at the former Randy Parton Theatre a campaign issue in her primary race against State Treasurer Richard Moore, her leading opponent. Last week, Moore said if elected he would seek legislation banning Transportation Board members from donating to any candidates or collecting donations on behalf of a candidate to reduce political influence on the board. Betts' resignation confirms that Perdue doesn't want to change the system, Moore's campaign said.

Tatum steps down as DMV chief

From the Raleigh News and Observer

Dan Kane, Staff Writer

N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles Commissioner George Tatum resigned Wednesday, after documents and interviews with an agency staffer suggested that Tatum helped a friend get a replica of a 1937 Ford truck titled as the real thing. Tatum could not be reached for comment, and a state Department of Transportation spokesman would say only that the resignation involved a personnel matter.

Gov. Mike Easley, who appointed Tatum commissioner in April 2003, said in a short statement that Tatum needed to resign. "I believe it was appropriate," Easley said.

Mark Foster, the DOT's chief financial officer, will be interim DMV commissioner.

The DMV, which issues driver's licenses and vehicle registrations and conducts safety and emissions inspections, has been long known as an agency with numerous controversies and scandals. Tatum is not the first commissioner to resign following allegations that he misused his office. Alexander Killens quit in 1996 after an audit showed he used staff as drivers and personal security. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor obstruction of justice for impeding an investigation into whether a DMV employee misused a state car.

Cruise Smells Fishy

From the Burlington Times-News

Barry Smith - Burlington Times-News

Sometimes I have to wonder why red flags don’t go up in people’s minds. This is supposed to be the year of ethics reform in the North Carolina legislature. A special committee has studied ways to change the state’s lobbying, ethics and campaign finance laws to make the operation of government and decision-making more transparent and free of undue influence.

Gov. Mike Easley has taken on the issue by appointing a new head of the state’s ethics board. The House has passed out, and the Senate is considering, a series of bills aimed at addressing some of the scandals in state government that have come to the forefront over the past year. Yet, episodes of lapses in judgment continue to occur. A few weeks ago, when the Carolina Hurricanes were making their run that led to the Stanley Cup, some lawmakers fessed-up to accepting free tickets from lobbyists for high-dollar seats at the RBC Center.

But over the Independence Day weekend, they were outdone. The State Ports Authority organized a cruise for more than 200 invited guests, mainly state and local officials, during the festival of tall ships in Beaufort. As reported by the Raleigh News & Observer, the Ports Authority had a ferry diverted from its normal run to wine and dine the officials during the holiday festival. On the menu were shrimp, scallops, sandwich wraps, fruit, pasta salad, desserts, beer and wine. A steel band provided entertainment. State House members, Cabinet members and local officials were among the guests who sent in an RSVP.

The Ports Authority has apologized for the lavish July 1 excursion, which gave guests a close-up view of the tall ships. And Easley, recognizing the bad smell, has called for a full report from the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Ports Authority on the cruise. The cruise appears inappropriate from nearly every angle.

To begin with, why is the DOT allowing the ferry, named the Floyd Lupton, to be used for such an event? Its purpose is transportation, not to be used as a high-dollar party boat. You have to wonder what the Ports Authority hoped to gain from hosting such a lavish party for people in high places. Might they want to curry favor in the future for proposals that come from the authority?

And then there are the state and local officials involved. Didn’t they wonder if such a fancy event would at least give an impression that something is a bit out of order? I guess not. There’s supposed to be an air of reform in the state capital. Reform certainly wasn’t in the air for state officials when the tall ships were along the coast.

Currituck dredging deadline disputed

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Former ferry chief expected to testify

RALEIGH - Jerry Gaskill, former head of the state ferry service, had to get a ferry operating from Currituck to Corolla by June 15, 2004, and federal prosecutors say he had employees dredge an illegal channel to meet that deadline.Gaskill, who oversaw the ferry service from 1993 until he was indicted in January, is charged with conspiring with employees to dredge the channel without the proper state and federal permits. Permit requests had been denied in the past because of the sensitive habitat nearby, prosecutors say.

"They knew when they were doing it, it was wrong," Assistant U.S. Attorney Banu Rangarajan told a jury Monday during her opening statement.

Gaskill, who denies wrongdoing, also is charged with lying to federal investigators and violating environmental laws. His trial might end as soon as Wednesday. He is expected to testify.

Prosecutors say that on May 6 and 7, 2004, seven ferry service employees used two boats to do "prop washing" or "kicking" -- using the boats' propellers to cut a channel in, in this case, Currituck Sound. The channel that was 6-feet-deep and 30 feet wide by 730 feet violated the Clean Water Act and another federal environmental law, prosecutors say.

The ferry was to carry passengers and schoolchildren to and from mainland Currituck to the remote town of Corolla on the northern Outer Banks. After the dredging was discovered, the state Department of Transportation agreed to fill in the channel. The ferry is not running at this time.

Gaskill's defense lawyer, Tommy Manning of Raleigh, told jurors that Gaskill had nothing to do with the dredging.

Manning disputed the idea that Gaskill was under any deadline pressure since on May 5, 2004 -- the day before the channel was illegally created -- Gaskill told the state transportation board that problems had delayed the ferry's start until August 2004.

Manning laid the blame for the dredging on one of Gaskill's underlings, Billy R. Moore, one of four state Department of Transportation employees who have pleaded guilty to federal charges. He is expected to testify. It was not Gaskill but Moore, the ferry service's dredging superintendent, who instructed his employees to create the channel, Manning said.

"You will not hear any evidence that Jerry Gaskill directed any of these men to do what happened," Manning said.

As state and federal officials questioned the illegal dredging, Manning says, Moore denied "prop washing" and kept telling Gaskill and others that his employees had only measured the depth of the water. Not until two months later did Moore admit to Gaskill what he had done and then implicated Gaskill when talking to investigators, Manning said.

Cracks in the system

From the NC Independent Weekly

by V.C. Rogers

Much to the dismay of long-suffering commuters, the fresh pavement on Interstate 40 in Durham that was finished just last winter has begun to crumble. After several years of construction-related traffic congestion, the barrels, cones and concrete barriers will have to be trotted back out for another interminable period. The probable source of the pavement breakdown has already been identified and reported, both by DOT and Applied Pavement Technology, a consultant hired to assess the problems. The project expanded I-40 from four to six lanes, with one new 14.5-inch-thick lane in each direction where the grassy median had been. The existing 11.5-inch lanes were topped with three inches of new concrete in a process called "bonded overlay," in which the new concrete is essentially laminated to the old. As with many highway paving projects, the old lanes had been sawed across at approximately 20-foot intervals to allow for expansion and contraction without buckling or cracking. As has been well documented in industry literature, the overlay should have been sawed completely through and the cuts located directly above the original pavement joints so the slabs would move together in the heat and cold.

Instead, as tests have confirmed, the contractor did not cut the full three inches through the overlay in most places, nor were the cuts properly aligned with those in the old pavement. When the bottom layer expanded and contracted as the weather changed, the pressure on the top layer caused it to crack, crumble and become unglued.

DOT officials initially announced they would seek repairs free of charge from the contractor, Granite Construction of California. But the consultant's report noted that the project plans did not include any drawings or specifications for the depth or location of the saw cuts; a Granite engineer told The News & Observer that the specs had called for a 1.5 inch cut, half the necessary depth. In either case, the fault would appear to lie with DOT rather than Granite.

But DOT's glaring screw-up with the plans is only the beginning of the story, and questions about the I-40 project (and others) need to be raised--if not by DOT in its internal investigation, then by someone else.

The consultant's report notes several issues with the inspection of the project. Inspectors are supposed to check the work of the contractor and conduct tests on a daily basis to ensure that the construction is going according to plan. But the inspections were apparently lacking in some critical areas. "Verifying sawcut depth is a routine and very necessary field inspection activity for all concrete pavement construction projects, whether they be new construction or resurfacing," the report states. "There is no record of any joint sawcut depth measurements being made in the field during construction for the bonded overlay."

Moreover, bond strength test data showed unusual variability and "raise a concern about the accuracy of testing," according to the report. The strength testing was supposed to have been done 14 days after the concrete was poured, but was instead done at different intervals. Evidence indicates that "the existing pavement surface preparation may not have been performed as required on a consistent basis," according to the report, and rough patches on the overlay surface that should have been caught by inspectors were bad enough that DOT started making repairs on them in July.

While DOT has about 900 inspectors on staff in its Highway Division, inspection services for the I-40 project were contracted out to HNTB, a large transportation infrastructure firm with 60 offices nationwide. HNTB is one of six companies with an open-ended contract to perform construction and engineering services for DOT on an as-needed basis. One might think that a project of the magnitude and import of the I-40 widening would have been a candidate for in-house inspections, but DOT spokesman Ernie Seneca says that private contractors are hired whenever DOT personnel are tied up with other ongoing projects, which was the case with I-40. "It's a workload issue," Seneca says.

Just what HNTB did on the job is unclear, because DOT is shielding HNTB's inspection diaries from public view. DOT has the option to withhold the diaries under the open-records statute, says Seneca, though he will not say why the agency is refusing to release the records beyond the fact that it's legal. The records may not contain anything incriminating, but hiding them only fuels suspicion to the contrary.

HNTB spokeswoman Barbara Pruitt acknowledged that the company was involved in the project, but in a minimal way. "We furnished inspectors to DOT, who then managed those inspectors," Pruitt says. "Beyond that, we were not on-site involved in it." Pruitt referred further questions back to DOT.

Asked to detail DOT's oversight role when private firms perform services that are often done in-house, Seneca has little to offer beyond saying that the Division Engineer is responsible for the administration of contracts, and that the Resident Engineer for the project has general oversight responsibility. It shouldn't be that difficult to determine if DOT routinely conducts spot inspections of its own, or reviews the daily diaries, or otherwise has procedures in place to make sure that contractors are doing what they're supposed to do. Whatever happened on I-40, the lack of internal oversight meant that design, construction and inspection errors were not caught until it was too late.

Seneca says that DOT will review the consultant's report and continue the investigation to its completion, though "responsibility is one of the key things that has not been determined at this juncture." At the very least, this should mean that several individuals will be fingered for shirking their duties and punished accordingly.

But disciplining a couple of lower-level bureaucrats--who may only have been doing what they've always done or been told to do, after all--won't address the systemic ills that the report and other information suggest may be at the core of the I-40 mess. If I-40 was plagued by a series of mistakes that were not caught, it would be ludicrous to believe that other projects have not suffered from the same deficiencies, even if the results aren't as dramatic. "If this is the way that business is being done, then it's a problem that has to be directly addressed," says Board of Transportation member Ken Spaulding, whose district includes the project. "Unless you change the process, then once the spotlight is off [the bad I-40 pavement], you go back to business as usual and problems as usual."

Repairs to I-40 are already under way. The consultant recommended grinding away the I-40 overlay and replacing it with a more traditional asphalt, a solution DOT is already planning to implement. But that fix only has a life span of eight to 12 years as opposed to the 20-plus years that the original design anticipated. Efforts to minimize inconvenience to the motoring public mean that much of the work will be done at night, which will increase its cost. So the highway, originally projected to cost less than $50 million, will cost millions to repair, then millions more to upgrade in a decade, possibly topping $100 million not too far down the road.

Meanwhile, opponents of the Triangle Transit Authority rail plan, already stripped to the bone, are drooling in anticipation of the prospect that the latest round of federal hoops will derail it entirely. As The N&O reported in its recent series on transit, rail projects are subject to constant ridership analyses, financial assessments and other reviews, any one of which can jeopardize federal funding. Highways, on the other hand, undergo little such scrutiny. The I-40 project stands as a metaphor for the idea that building new lanes as the sole solution to traffic congestion is a strategy doomed to cost us more than we can possibly anticipate.