JACKSON - By any name - MDOT, state Highway Commission, or what it really is, a statewide county board of supervisors - ever since the state began building a highway system in 1936, the three-member elected agency in charge of it has been an albatross around Mississippi's neck.
Throughout more than the first 50 years of its existence, it was known as the state Highway Commission. In the early 1990s, it was renamed the Mississippi Department of Transportation, and took on the glorified acronym, MDOT.
But today's state's elected highway body is still the same archaic body of three members elected by districts it always was, the only in the country where the governor has no voice and there is scant legislative oversight.
Once again, it is the target of heavy public criticism. The loudest is rightfully coming from the Katrina-battered Mississippi Gulf Coast, where billions of dollars in federal money are being sent down from Washington earmarked for rebuilding shattered bridges and highways.
This means MDOT has been handed the biggest pot of money it has had its hand on in years. But now five months after Katrina hit, angry Coast folks are seeing no results and a litany of excuses coming out of MDOT.
The word "arrogant" is commonly being used to describe the response Coast people are getting from MDOT brass, especially its executive director, Butch Brown, who seems to dominate the agency, even though he is not an elected official. But he gained his power by forming a close alliance with two of three commissioners.
Ironically, 30 years ago this year, one of Brown's predecessors, the commission's then-highly touted director, former state Rep. E.L. Boteler Jr., became the first state official in many years to be convicted of embezzlement of public funds.
Boteler, who had been appointed by the commission as a concession to the Legislature because of his reputation as a legislative watchdog of highway money, wound up pocketing $200,000 of its funds and sentenced to the slammer.
Over a 14-year span after Boteler went down, amazingly, three elected commissioners were convicted on charges for either taking kickbacks from road contractors or other degrees of corruption and got jail time.
Despite this sordid record, and periodic investigations that revealed gross mismanagement and waste of tax money, the archaic state highway agency has withstood moves by at least four governors to either junk it entirely and replace it with a professionally run appointive system or significantly curb its powers.
Legislative mistrust has been evident every time lawmakers have enacted a big highway spending program going back to Gov. Hugh White's landmark 1936 program that finally put paved highways around the state where there had been mud and dirt roads before.
White succeeded where no one else has: He got lawmakers to replace the three-member elected highway commission with a highway czar appointed by him. Even though that marked the state's greatest advance in highway building, it lasted only two years and the elective commission was restored.
The Sun-Herald newspaper at Biloxi recently published a series of four articles entitled, "MDOT the Fourth Branch," which detailed in depth how the state's highway agency has become an awesome, impenetrable political force in Mississippi.
Anyone in state or local government who crosses MDOT does so at his own risk, the Sun-Herald concludes. It backs up the assertion with cases that illustrate how the highway commission can throw its weight around.
To begin with, MDOT has a $1 billion annual budget and more than 3,300 employees scattered around the state. That in itself gives the agency leverage in helping or hurting local economies.
Even one of the three presently elected commissioners, the Central District's Dick Hall, a Republican, has felt the wrath of the agency after he got the commission to fire Butch Brown as director four years ago for jacking up his salary by $50,000 and buying a helicopter for the agency.
When Northern District Commissioner Bill Minor (no relation to this writer) was elected to the body in 2003, he joined with Southern District Commissioner Wayne Brown (no relation to Butch) and rehired Butch at a $137,635 salary.
Since then Hall has been banished from keeping his office in the palatial $20 million new MDOT office building (that's a story in itself) and is operating out of a trailer in rural Rankin County.
Meantime, vehicle movement on the Gulf Coast is badly crippled as two vital Highway 90 bridges - the Biloxi-Ocean Springs span and the bridge over the Bay of St. Louis - still lie in a wreckage of broken concrete from Katrina as debate between MDOT and local (as well as some state) officials rages.
What type of structure is built to connect Biloxi and Ocean Springs is the hottest potato. MDOT is pushing a six-lane high-rise bridge (some call it a tower of Babel) with no drawspan, while feisty Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran is staunchly fighting to stick with a four-lane bridge similar to what Gov. Haley Barbour's Mississippi Renewal Forum suggested.
This bridge fight could very well have state-level political legs and bring Barbour into the fray to take on MDOT's structure and how the behemoth operates. As the cliché goes, stay tuned.
