Governor-elect Bev Perdue's appointment of Gene Conti as secretary of transportation -- long rumored but not made public until her news conference this morning -- is part of a distinct effort to signal that things will be different at the Department of Transportation. It may be an end to the ride that let members of the N.C. Board of Transportation channel highway projects to their home towns.
Conti is a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Transportation and also was chief deputy secretary at the N.C. Department of Transportation for two years early in the Easley administration. More recently he has been vice chair of the N.C. Global TransPark Authority. He also holds a PhD in anthropology from Duke University.
What makes this appointment interesting is that Perdue ignored the advice of Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, who publicly called for the appointment of DOT board member Lanny Wilson of Wilmington, who has raised money for politicians including Perdue, to be secretary of transportation. And she also chose not to appoint state Sen. Clark Jenkins, D-Edgecombe, who was among those whose names were bandied about for the job. This is one good way to declare her independence from the Senate, where she was a member and over which she has presided the past eight years.
More significant to me is Perdue's call for a dramatic change in the way the N.C. Board of Transportation operates. She wants to make it strictly a long-range planning board and take it out of the business of making regular decisions on highway and other transportation projects. It will require some statutory changes to accomplish this, but Perdue plans to issue an executive order next Monday starting this process and to make it clear to appointees that decisions belong with Conti and the department's professional staff. She'll also require board members to sign a tough new ethics policy.
If Perdue can manage this, and fight off any uproar that develops in the legislature because of unhappiness over ending the longtime connection between contributing money and landing a board of transportation appointment that enables board members to steer transportation projects where they like, she will have made a real contribution to ending the pay-to-play tradition in Raleigh.
