State may pay contractor to maintain I-71

ODOT seeks to cut costs to keep road work on schedule.

State transportation officials are considering paying private contractors to plow snow, fill potholes and take over maintenance of I-270 in central Ohio and a 100-mile stretch of I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati.

The plans are part of a stepped-up effort to cut costs and produce new income that could shorten threatened delays for dozens of highway projects statewide. The Ohio Department of Transportation says it needs $1.6 billion to keep its construction schedule on track, and it has an additional $10 billion in work being planned with no current way to pay for its completion.

“We cannot wait for Washington to send more money,” Director Jerry Wray said last week in an address to department employees, contractors, legislators and local officials.

“We have to focus on what we control and what we can change now in Ohio.”

Jim Riley, a deputy ODOT director hired in March to run a new division that will spearhead such revenue efforts, said he has just begun studying the idea of privatizing maintenance and couldn’t project how much money it might save.

Every year, Ohio spends $5,253 on maintenance for each mile of each lane of state, federal and interstate highway within its borders.

That amounts to $1.9 million on I-270 and more than $6.4 million for the Columbus-to-Cincinnati stretch of I-71.

Private contractors would be considered to perform every maintenance job along the highways, including removing dead animals, painting lane markers, spreading road salt, laying new asphalt and performing minor repairs.

The state already hires private companies to do some of that work on a task-by-task basis, Riley said. If privatization moves forward, one company would get a contract to do it all — “fence to fence” in ODOT lingo — along one or more stretches of highway.

“We’ve got a lot of other stuff to do,” Riley said. “We’re in the business of roads and bridges.”

The state is considering handing over more maintenance work to private contractors as part of future contracts to build a new Ohio River bridge in Cincinnati and a new highway bypass around Portsmouth in Scioto County.

I-270 and I-71 are the only highways now being considered for privatized maintenance, Riley said.

The new ODOT division also is considering commercial development at rest stops on state and federal highways, and it is exploring the idea of selling naming rights for roads, bridges and other highway features.

Privatization has been a controversial idea even when considered for government services not thought of as vital to public safety. For example, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee’s plan to lease a profitable campus parking operation for $400 million or more has been met with protests by some students and faculty members.

“There is this presumption that the private sector is always going to cost less, and that isn’t the case,” said Sally Meckling, spokeswoman for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, a union that represents workers at ODOT and other state agencies.

The transportation department already has discovered that the private sector can’t always do better, Meckling said. ODOT backed away from a plan to privatize sign-making when it found out that the state wouldn’t save money.

Riley said ODOT would set strict performance standards for privatized highway maintenance and wouldn’t pay for shoddy work. He also said current state highway workers wouldn’t lose their jobs. Payroll would be cut through attrition, he said.

Florida began outsourcing highway maintenance in 2000 as part of a pledge by then-Gov. Jeb Bush to reduce the number of state employees. About 80 percent of the work — $300 million worth — is performed today by private contractors, said Tim Lattner, maintenance-office director for the Florida Department of Transportation.

He said his state hasn’t compared costs of outsourced vs. in-house work. Its maintenance budget was cut 12 percent this year, though, he said, because Florida road conditions had far exceeded state standards.

Depending WASHINGTON – on who’s doing the grading, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan is either a remarkable success in Congress or an abysmal failure.

The National Education Association votes for the latter. The nation’s largest teachers union gave Jordan, a conservative Republican from Urbana, an “F” in its most recent legislative report card. The American Conservative Union, meanwhile, gave him a score of 100 both for this Congress and as a lifetime grade.

Both are scores he welcomes.

Legislative report cards are nothing new — the NAACP, for example, has been doing them since 1914. And with election season kicking into high gear, you’ll no doubt see more of them as specialinterest groups work to educate their members on where lawmakers stand. Lawmakers, too, will tout them as they work to make distinctions from their challengers in the months ahead.

But those who compile them say one thing has become more marked in recent years: In a Congress where both parties are, for the most part, lock step with one another, shades of gray are increasingly harder to find.

That means moderate “B” and “C” lawmakers have gone the way of the rotary-dial telephone, the dinosaur and the 8-track. They are rare, if not extinct.

“I think you do see a bigger polarization in grades,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington bureau and senior vice president for advocacy and policy for the organization. “Usually when you see more people in the middle it has to do with absences, which also speaks to the lack of moderates, quite frankly.”

Shelton said just a few years ago, moderate Republicans like Arlen Specter in the Senate or Chris Shays in the House made the report cards a little more diverse. Now, it’s far more polarized.

In the Ohio congressional delegation, for example, lawmakers are either “A’s” or “F’s” — there isn’t another mark in the bunch. In its 2005-06 scorecard, most Ohio lawmakers had “A’s” or “F’s,” but scattered among them were a “C” lawmaker, then-Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lisbon, and a “B” lawmaker — Rep. Tim Ryan, DNiles.

In the most recent scorecard, there are nuances in numerical scores, however: Among Republicans, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, received a high score of 30. Jordan, whose district covers an 11-county area that includes Champaign and Shelby counties, received a low score of 5. And while Democrats Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, Betty Sutton of Copley Township, and Marcia Fudge of Cleveland both got high scores of 100, Democrats Ryan and Dennis J. Kucinich of Cleveland got low scores — of 95.

Shelton said the scorecard is not supposed to be partisan. “We believe some issues should rise above petty party politics,” he said.

In 2005, 143 congressional Republicans received an A, B, C, or D on the National Education Association’s congressional scorecard.

In 2011, 57 did. The rest got F’s, according to Ken Ruberg, a congressional analyst with the organization. Among the three Ohio Republicans who managed to score above failing: Reps. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Twp., and Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, who got D’s, and Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Bainbridge Twp., who received an A.

“On labor issues, (LaTourette) has a significantly different view than the Republican Party, and our ratings reflect that,” Ruberg said.

The NEA aims to make its report cards more nuanced than other organizations’; rather than just basing them on votes, they take in a variety of factors, including lawmakers’ accessibility to NEA members, bills sponsored and committee work.

Still, “the type of people serving in Congress is changing,” Ruberg said, “and that is reflected in our voting ratings.”

Ron Eidshaug of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues that his organization’s scores aren’t limited to complete failure or unadulterated success.

“The philosophy for the scorecard is that we come up with votes that accurately reflect how members deal with issues important to the business community,” he said. Health care and free trade are among those issues.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has never been on the high end of their roster – his lifetime score is 32 – but he’s seen dramatic swings in his scores on a yearly basis. In 2008, he got a 63, based in part on votes reauthorizing higher education and establishing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, often dubbed the bank bailout.

But in 2010, he got a 9 based on votes on food safety modernization, a bill barring government contractors from giving political contributions and the health care law.