Jeff Landry’s transition team is rolling at present, and the ULL campus is a frenetic scene of activity as Landry’s appointees are busily attempting to put together a government that can successfully make fundamental change in how Louisiana governs itself.

This is a big deal. This state is essentially a poster child for bureaucratic failure, and there are state agencies so bloated and obsolete in how they operate that they exacerbate the problems they exist to solve in many cases.

Like for example, we have a Department of Children and Family Services which places kids with child abusers with an uncomfortable regularity. We have a Department of Health which actively killed COVID patients by directing hospitals to put them on ventilators and financially incentivized those hospitals to do it.

And we have a Department of Transportation and Development which seems to delight in failing to finish road projects until it can milk them for all the money and time it can get out of them.

DOTD has been a colossal problem for a very long time, and the public sector mentality in this state is so corrosive that its former head was the Democrats’ candidate f9r governor this past year. Shawn Wilson advertised himself as a “bridge-builder,” which was one of the funniest campaign slogans – unintentionally so – in modern times.

Wilson didn’t actually build any bridges of note while he had the job running DOTD. The glaring lack of progress was one of the hallmarks of the John Bel Edwards administration he worked under.

DOTD is such a disaster that in Baton Rouge, it’s noted more for its efforts at reducing lanes of traffic than increasing them. Its “road diet” plan on Government Street led to citizens placing scarecrows on medians to protest the neglect of its landscaping, and Wilson had to scrap a plan on widening I-10 through the city which would have turned the expressway into essentially a two-lane road for more than a year after the public threw a fit.

Zero progress of any note was made on building a new bridge across the Mississippi in Baton Rouge and none has been made on replacing the dangerously rickety I-10 bridge across the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles. And only just before Wilson had lost the election to Landry did the flyover ramps from I-10 to the access road to the new terminal at the New Orleans airport finally open.

Meanwhile, all we see is continuous public relations posturing by the governor and his people about “Boondoggle Express” passenger rail service between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, something which represents one of the most colossal wastes of time and money Louisiana’s government has ever engaged in. If you want mass transit between Baton Rouge and New Orleans Greyhound Bus Lines is perfectly available to handle your needs for under $20 at zero cost to the taxpayer.

You can’t just let this ridiculously deficient agency mosey along at its pokey pace. Louisiana’s infrastructure is an utter joke, and everything about DOTD needs to be shaken up.

Most importantly, its leadership has to have a completely different mentality. We need someone at the top of DOTD who’s disgusted by its failure and who’ll say so.

I don’t know who’s being considered to head that agency. What I can say is we need somebody willing to call out the waste and the stupidity and the languid inaction we see at DOTD.

Give me somebody like Mark Wright, for example. Wright is a state representative from Mandeville who chairs the House Transportation Committee and he’s seethed about the idiocy he’s seen for years. Here was Wright when DOTD finally opened those flyover ramps at the New Orleans airport and celebrated the opening by, of all things, dragging a Mardi Gras float onto one of them…

And Wright was the vice chairman of the Joint Transportation, Highways and Public Works Committee at the Legislature which refused to fund another Edwards-Wilson boondoggle, that being the idea of putting tolls on the proposed new I-10 bridge in Lake Charles.

That happened a week ago, and Wright lit up DOTD and its private partners on the bridge project (see the video here, and Wright’s part of the proceedings starts at the 52:30 mark) over the idea of making it a toll bridge.

Toll roads and bridges definitely have their uses. Louisiana should probably build a lot of toll roads and bridges in the future. The problem is that they’re an awful idea to put on interstate highways, and the Edwards DOTD has been trying to force those tolls down the throats of legislators for years.

So when the committee voted down the toll bridge in Lake Charles there was a lot of caterwauling – ignorant caterwauling, at that – about how it was a partisan ploy to deny Edwards credit for building infrastructure. Here was the Democrats’ candidate for state treasurer Dustin Granger, who from now on we’ll call Tolls Granger, screeching about how the project got voted down…

 

Wright popped Granger for that…

I’m not saying Mark Wright has to be Landry’s DOTD head. I don’t even know if he’s interested in the job, or if he’s on the radar for it.

What I am saying is that it’s crucial for the next head of DOTD has to have the mentality that DOTD has been guilty of criminally wasting money and operating far too slowly to effectively serve the taxpayers, and that the days of demanding more and more money for the same lousy service must end.

Because the status quo crowd simply wants more in gas taxes to fund the same poor performance and the same lazy approach to road construction and maintenance.

If that’s Wright, fine. If it’s somebody else with the same attitude, maybe from a private-sector or even military background, that’s fine too. But Landry doesn’t want to put somebody in place who isn’t willing and focused on a revolution in how DOTD works.

It’s time to get aggressive.