- In our "First Look" tonight, a scathing audit
of Wisconsin's Department of Transportation
got a hearing this week at the capitol.
Among the highlights of the audit,
the cost of 16 ongoing major highway projects
increased by $3.1 billion over original estimates.
This was because the DOT did not take inflation into account.
The proportion of state highways rated in good condition
decreased from 53.5% in 2010
to 41% in 2015.
And the proportion of state of highways in good condition in
Wisconsin was considerably lower according to the audit than
in six other Midwestern states.
The airing of these and other facts that auditors found come
in the midst of wrangling over how to fill a billion dollar
shortfall in transportation funding in Wisconsin and
disagreement over raising for example, the gas tax,
to generate more funds.
But now given the audit results legislators learned that the
billion dollar hole is also deeper.
So one lawmaker suggested Wisconsin stop digging that hole
and stop talking about how to increase funding for
transportation until the agency does better.
Delafield Republican Senator Chris Kapenga joins us in
Milwaukee.
Democratic State Senator from Alma,
Kathleen Vinehout sits on the audit committee and she is here
in Madison.
She also calls out the DOT
for its lack of transparency and oversight.
And welcome to both of you.
- Pleasure to be here. - Thanks.
- First to you Senator in Milwaukee
and I want to get this from both of you.
What was your overall reaction Senator Kapenga
when you saw the audit?
- We had some preliminary indications
just in our interviews and discussions with DOT
and some people kind of engaged in DOT projects
that there was going to be some issues coming out.
We had seen this for a couple years where
when we asked questions about certain things
and why this project was being done
or what about these dollar amounts,
the answers weren't adding up.
So it wasn't a complete shock, but I think what was interesting
is for the first time, we have a secretary
who just got put in place,
who actually was kind of an open book,
which was encouraging for me to see
on the depth of the problems.
And remember, as Senator Vinehout knows,
this was a limited scope audit so it was not
digging into everything and we found massive problems.
- Senator Vinehout, what about your reaction?
- Well the audit is very detailed and there are a lot of
very specific recommendations that the audit has on what both
the legislature can do and what DOT can do.
I was very pleased that the audit,
bipartisan audit members were focused on solutions.
They wanted DOT to come back right away.
They wanted to have progress reports.
They wanted to see data every six months.
We, as an audit committee, bipartisan audit committee,
unanimously introduced a bill to put some accountability into the
statutes that should have been there 20 years ago.
- This didn't come as a grand surprise to either one of you.
Senator Kapenga, how bad is this?
- It's bad enough to where not only do we know that there's an
issue with estimating the costs.
We know that there is an issue with the priority of the
projects that are put in place.
So now, it's not just, well, is the dollar amount that we're
giving the DOT appropriate?
When we see that there's projects that are slated in that
should not even be slated in and when we ask questions about
why did you do the projects you did, when we don't have answers
to that and they can't give us a rhyme or reason,
that's concerning.
- I want to stay with you Senator Kapenga,
who is to blame?
- Well, you can point fingers but at the end of the day,
the DOT Secretary is the one
who's responsible for his department.
So Mark Gottlieb who was in that position,
did leave that position recently.
And we were a little bit concerned with some performance
things we had seen there.
Right now what we're focused on, as Senator Vinehout pointed out,
is we now have to fix what we see.
So pointing fingers doesn't do a lot of good at this point.
We just realize there's a major process revamp
that has to take place.
And we'll see that coming.
- Senator Vinehout, what role do delays in projects play in
these cost overruns?
- That's a big question right now.
One of the objectives is to
try and balance that transportation budget.
To balance it, if we cut back on projects, there are delays.
If there are delays, there are cost overruns.
So every solution has to be considered for the unintended
consequences.
That's one of the problems.
- And staying with you Senator Vinehout,
the audit talked about the conditions of the highways in
Wisconsin decreasing, you know, they're not as good as they were
and they're getting worse, and furthermore they don't compare
favorably to surrounding Midwestern states.
What are the concerns about that for Wisconsin's economy?
- Well, it's a huge concern.
We have bridges in my own county that have been condemned and we
still have schoolchildren that are crossing those condemned
bridges in the middle of the winter to get to the school bus.
There was a bridge that just collapsed
just this week in Buffalo County.
And I fear that there's more to come.
The floods that we had last summer
have weakened a lot of the bridges.
There are businesses that can't operate that are talking to me
about closing, because they can't get the tourist buses
across the bridge that has been out since last July.
This affects our economy.
It affects people.
It affects vehicles that are damaged by poor roads and poor
bridges and it puts people in danger.
- Senator Kapenga do you think that's overstating the condition
of the roads?
- No, there's actually a map that DOT showed us in the audit
hearing that we were in.
It was a color-coded map and it showed very clearly
the areas of the state where the road conditions were poor.
This is when we started asking questions.
They brought up a situation where there was a $500 million
project that was approved and that project was only 20 years
into its 50-year life.
And when they said why are we doing this
and not spending the money outstate where we have problems,
as the Senator brought up, there was no response to that.
They didn't have an answer.
That's what we're so concerned about.
- Meanwhile, Senator Kapenga, you have suggested the time is
not now to start talking about increasing funds to fill the
transportation shortfall, or you know,
start on any new projects until this gets straightened out.
Where does that leave you in terms of the people who want to
look for a sustainable source of funding for transportation?
- The first thing you have to look at is when you do budgeting
and I've done budgeting in my previous life as a CPA.
It's something that I've done a lot of.
You have to have good underlying assumptions when you budget.
The problem that the DOT highlights is you can't even
make good assumptions when you're trying to project.
For instance, what is the right dollar amount?
You don't know because you can't tell what projects are
appropriate and what are not.
So what I've said is the governor in his proposed budget
has a good solution where we bond at a very reduced level for
the next two years, and that allows Secretary Ross to get his
arms around this problem and come to us to fix it.
- And Senator Vinehout, where do you stand on increasing the
gas tax or something like that, at this juncture?
- We need to find efficiencies.
We need to reduce spending but we also need to raise revenue.
And it's very clear, looking at how much money has been
transferred from other programs, like schools and the UW,
into the transportation fund.
The fund itself is not sustainable.
And these efficiencies, we need to capture every single one of
them, but we cannot sustain this spending at this level.
We cannot sustain $1 of every five going into paying off debt.
We have to fix it.
- All right, we leave it there.
Senator Vinehout in Madison and Senator Kapenga in Milwaukee,
thank you very much.
- Thank you. - Thank you.