Update: So that bottom line there on the original story — because we know you all made it that far on a Friday afternoon with only hours to go until beer o’clock — has blown up into a bit of a tiff. Originally, ODOT head Jerry Wray said in a release that in his conversation with Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez, the latter blamed “political pressure” for the agency’s reversal.
But the Federal Highway Administration is now denying that account of the conversation. This came out today from Cathy St. Denis, a spokeswoman with the federal agency:
“Administrator Mendez said nothing about political pressure in his conversation with Director Wray. He told Wray the scope of work as currently designed was not an eligible use of federal funds —period.”
Yup, pretty awkward.
Also, if you skip down below, you can now read the full letter sent my the Ohio Democrats.
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The tension between the private-public sectors is getting a lot of mileage these days in the conversations about what state governments can do to save money. One Republican-friendly approach has been to privatize state institutions such as prisons and liquor boards, putting the fiscal responsibility in the hands of companies. The administration in Columbus has also floated the idea to privatize the turnpike. In order to test the viability of that brainstorm, the Ohio Department of Transportation asked the federal government to fork over some funding. The request was initially greenlit for about $1.5 million. That’s right: one public entity asked another public entity for public money to study whether or not a public entity could be made private. You see the issue with that last integer there.
So did Ohio’s Democratic representatives in Washington. According to the Plain Dealer, US Reps Tim Ryan, Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich, Marcia Fudge, Betty Sutton and Sen. Sherrod Brown all sent a letter to Department of Transportation demanding that the federal funding for the privatization study be cut off. The department bowed to the wishes of the Ohio legislators.
This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2011.