Even Walker's former allies are saying he's FOS about DOT

As our Fair Governor continues to get hammered for the increasing Scottholes and the lack of a plan to pay to fill them, he and his staff have been getting increasingly desperate to explain away their failures. And the spins and deceptions are causing Scott Walker to get criticism from numerous areas in recent days including from former allies.

Let's follow up from the story that broke over the weekend on Green Bay's Channel 2, where the Wisconsin DOT has failed to send on $46 million in federal aid to local planning authorities around Wisconsin.

Katelyn Ferral followed up on this report at Madison.com yesterday, and included the Madison side of this situation, mentioning the Capitol City hadn’t received nearly $6.8 million of these funds. Ferral talked to Bill Schaefer, who manages transportation planning for the organization in Madison that would have gotten this money for local projects, and he says the problem began in 2017 due to some Walker Administration tinkering.

Last year, the state notified municipalities that it was considering changes to the program and as such did not give them their annual share of state funds, or tell cities how much money to expect from the federal government, Schaefer said. This year, the state said it decided not to make changes and gave cities their annual grant but did not explain what happened to the previous year's grant, he said.

"Where did the money go? What projects did it go for? Did we really just lose a year’s worth of funding? That isn't legal," Schaefer said. "Logically, it seems we’re being shorted."

The Madison Area Transportation Board is a type of policy-making board, called a metropolitan planning organization, or an MPO. These organizations are required under federal law to represent urban areas with populations over 50,000 people. There are several MPOs in Wisconsin, many of which are asking similar questions, Schaefer said.

As someone who has “worked in the business”, what this seems to mean is that 2017’s money is able to be released, if WisDOT wants to do it - the US DOT allows a few years for the money to be sent out and used before it asks for it back.

But WisDOT isn’t freeing up the money, which makes me wonder what purpose it serves to hold back these funds. And the answer from WisDOT’s Walker-appointed flack didn’t help to clear it up.

"It is untrue that any cut has been made to the Surface Transit Program (STP). The $46.1 million, which has been made available to local governments each year since 2014, was made available in 2018, and will continue," said Christian Schneider, a spokesman for DOT.

THIS HACK? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

"Planning in 2017 was delayed by a year while the state debated whether to fund the program with state or federal funds. Thus, when it was restarted in 2018, the state decided to go with a four-year planning window rather than the five-year window used the previous two cycles," DOT said in a statement. "In doing so, it may appear that funding was left out of 2018 in the new plan; yet the funds were already covered under the previous plan and were allocated according to that plan."

No, it doesn’t sound like WisDOT has had its pass-through funding cut from DC. So where’s that $46 million going? Is it filling some other WisDOT budget hole so it can hide a budget deficit that won’t appear until after the November elections? Is it going to be released next year to create a one-time “double-payment” from the Feds to try to cover the massive DOT deficit in the next budget?

Or is just plain incompetence and stupidity that is forcing local governments and property taxpayers to have to make up the difference for the lack of money going into these MPOs? Sounds like wingnut welfare boy Schneider needs to have some follow-ups thrown his way.

It's not just planning people that are asking what's going on in WalkerWorld when it comes to DOT issues. Walker also found himself called out by Road Builders, who pushed back on Scotty’s claims that road projects were too big for the amount of traffic that is on them.

Pat Goss, executive director of the Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association said Walker’s suggestion that special interests are fueling roadway expansions is “absolutely not factual.”

“In terms of projects and who picks them, that is purely up to the professionals at places like the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. You have professionals at counties and towns and cities who make decisions based on an analysis of their systems,” Goss said. “We do not work with the department on ‘do this project, do this project.’ That’s, quite frankly, ridiculous.”

Two environmental impact studies conducted by the state for the Interstate 39/90 Beltline interchange and Interstate 94 north and southbound, both approved by the federal government, show that bigger, wider interchanges are indeed needed to keep highways safe and mitigate growing traffic.

In the Beltline study, officials recommended that additional lanes be added as traffic steadily increases on the highway through 2030.
“In order to maintain acceptable operations on the interstate, a six-lane freeway is necessary,” according to the study, which anticipated that improvements would start in 2012. The project has since been delayed.

And over the weekend, former DOT Secretary Mark Gottlieb basically called Walker a liar for claiming that DOT officials are biased for road-building interests, In the process, Gottlieb stood up for the work and independence of civil servants at DOT.

Take the example of a project in Milwaukee that the Governor originally supported but then postponed indefinitely – the 3.5 mile stretch of the East-West Freeway between the Marquette and Zoo Interchanges. The study document on that project is 946 pages long, and cost over $20 million to prepare. It includes a detailed evaluation of no less than seven design alternatives, including some that add capacity and some that do not. The expansion option was selected because it will reduce congestion to an acceptable level while lowering crash rates by an estimated 23 percent, when compared to simple replacement of the current highway. The same level of scrutiny is applied to other large scale projects.

Governor Walker links this change in policy to his prediction that vehicle travel will decline in the future, despite the fact that it has risen steadily since the end of the recession. Most highways being actively considered for expansion in Wisconsin are already unacceptably congested today, causing delay, economic loss and higher crash rates. How much risk are we willing to accept to see if the Governor’s predictions hold true? If they don’t, we will have spent billions of dollars to duplicate 1960 era designs that will be obsolete the day they are built.

The Governor’s seemingly offhand comment that the decision to widen our highways is driven by outside interests is not factually based, and is profoundly disrespectful to the professionals in the private and public sector who are trained to design and build safe and efficient highways for all to use.

Then again, maybe Walker is just confused about the concept of telling the truth instead of releasing BS that makes the Big Boss look good. Kind of like the Man-Baby in the Oval Office who had to be told trying to reduce the national debt by printing money was a really bad idea.

I get that Walker is terrified of having to search for his first real job in 8 weeks, and that's why he's throwing this garbage against the wall to try to avoid culpability on DOT-related issues. But it just makes him look at the more pathetic, and the whining, contradictions and excuses make him look like an even bigger loser that's unfit for the job.