The Extra Mile Podcast: Legislative Session
MDOT Executive Director Brad White

(Paul) Welcome in to another edition of The Extra Mile podcast legislative session presented by The Mississippi Department of Transportation. I’m MDOT Deputy Director of Public Affairs Paul Katool. And I’m happy to welcome back Will Craft, the Director of Public Affairs, to the show. Will, the show has certainly not been as fun without you, so thanks for coming back.

(Will) Absolutely. You’re too kind, Paul. Y’all did a great job.

(Paul) Appreciate it. Appreciate it. So, we have a really fun episode today. We’re actually, if you’re watching, we’re on location at the Mississippi State Capitol to wrap up the 2023 legislative session, and we have, of course, MDOT Executive Director Brad White. Brad, thank you for helping us set this up today, and uh, thanks for coming on the show and speaking with us.

(Brad) Thank you. Always a pleasure to be with you.

(Paul) For sure. For sure. So, um, why don’t you talk about this room. We’re in the Capitol, room 114 in the Capitol so, uh -

(Will) Stuck back here.

(Paul) Tell, yeah, yeah, tell us about it.

(Brad) Well, it’s a room that not many people know it’s here because of just where its location is - kind of off the beaten path. It’s in under the custodianship of the House of Representatives, and so most all of my experiences in here have been in meetings with larger delegations of the of the House. I think this used to be like a room that held phones for people to get to, to make calls and stuff like that years and years ago.

Since I’ve been involved in government for the last 39 years, I think the Senate has done their best to try to get this back, since it’s on the Senate side of the Capitol, but the House of Representatives holds on to it pretty tightly, and as you look around, you understand why. In my opinion, it’s one of the more beautiful rooms in the Capitol, with the exception of maybe the governor’s ceremonial office.

(Paul) Truly beautiful.

(Will) It’s very nice. We’re very much appreciative to be able to get back here and record in this space. We’re over here at the Capitol, like we said, and we’re wrapping up the legislative session. It’s been another, another really good year for us, wouldn’t you say?

(Brad) I think so. It was a good year, a long session, uh, tiring, I think, for everybody involved, especially those that are members of the legislature and leadership that do all the work to make this go on, the staff members. But we had a good, a good year. They gave us another, for the second year in a row, our appropriation bill was clean. There were no earmarks, no other language inserted into to it, that would hinder our ability to make full use of all the federal funds that we have available to us. So, that allows the professionals that we have at MDOT to play the shell game, of sorts, to make sure that we’re utilizing that full use of our federal funds that co-mingle with the state funds collected from fuel tax.

So, having a clean bill is of most importance, and that alone would have been a victory, in my opinion. But, they were kind enough to do another year with a supplement appropriation that gave us additional funds, uh, that combined with our appropriation of, assuming it all becomes law, uh, will give us an excess of about $2 billion dollars this year. Well, $500 million of which would be spread out, or paid out, over the next few years.

But, they gave us $40 million again, for the extra match needed to get the additional $200 million that’s been made available to us through the, uh, federal infrastructure bill that was passed by congress a few years ago. They gave us $100 million in the Emergency Road and Bridge Relief program that will be spent all on local systems around the state. So, all 82 counties have the opportunity to benefit from that.

The legislature did something a little new. They created a new multimodal fund that, um, will give the department a little more flexibility in how we spend what money goes into that fund among rail and airport and water ports, and funded it to the tune of about $30 million. We will continue to use the investments that we’ve made in the past to make sure that our commitments to public transit are met. They were not mentioned in this bill, but all four of the other modes of transportation will be well taken care of with this additional money.

And then the big-ticket item was $420 million towards capacity projects. And the importance of that was that’s all one-time money that they’re giving us to allow the commission to fund large construction projects that we had scheduled that would be ready to let the contract on this year and next year, but that we didn’t have the money for. So, with that investment, we’ll be able to fully fund and let to contract the major capacity projects that were scheduled for 2023, as well as 2024.

And they gave partial funding to a couple of the big projects in Desoto County and Lafayette County - Highway 7 and I-55 that are not scheduled to let the contract until 2025, and so, we’ve got time to build upon that seed money to do that.

But the thing that I’m proud of, though, is that they’re looking at this from MDOT’s three-year plan. So, they’re following the data that the professionals at the department put together. So, this money is not being spent in a just a “throw a dart at the wall” sort of way. It’s following a lot of purposeful, uh, you know, information that’s been put together by our staff so that it’s moving projects out of the queue that will allow for us to move everybody else’s project up. So, if your project didn’t receive funding this year, you still have an opportunity to benefit from this statewide.

(Paul) Brad, so you mentioned multimodal, and, you know, this just isn’t the highway department. We do a lot of different things at MDOT. So, can you kind of give us a better idea of why it’s important to make those investments?

(Brad) Sure. We try to look at our transportation system around the state holistically. Uh, you know, highways don’t exist in a vacuum. The more use that can be made of rail, or particularly freight rail, and ports and the usage of our airports, some of that helps take some of the burden off of our highways, which lessens the wear and tear and makes our money go further. So, the stronger that we make each of these different modes of transportation, the stronger our system is overall.

What I’m excited about with this program is they patterned it much by the Emergency Road and Bridge program. So, there’s an advisory board that will be made up of some of the stakeholders, both from an economic development standpoint, as well as from those that deal with these different modes of transportation. And, um, they will be working with us to, uh, develop rules and procedures through which application be made to take advantage of these funds and to hopefully use these funds to leverage even additional funds from the federal level.

But it’s something that, you know, we became the Department of Transportation in the early 90s, yet there’s never ever really been a lot of money funneled to the department, uh, that we didn’t fund ourselves through the Office of Highways that dealt with these other modes of transportation. So, this provides an opportunity for the legislature to now engage in making sure resources, outside of the federal government and outside of what we’ve done as a department in the past, can devote to these different modes of transportation.

So, it’s a good program, and I think it’ll give the professionals, I keep going back to, at the department, as well as the commission, the opportunity to make sure that the money gets to where the needs are and that we’re maximizing that investment to the the best purpose of the taxpayer of the state.

(Paul) That’s excellent.

(Will) Yeah, and a lot of good things went on for us, as Brad just mentioned and detailed - a lot of those, not directly related to appropriations, but certainly to the department and the legislature. Commissioner Dick Hall - creating the welcome center for him - talk a little bit about that for us.

(Brad) Yeah. I was very, uh, personally pleased with the legislature’s decision to honor him in such a way. Highway memorials are things that happen every year, and they’re very important. They’re things that matter to the families and, and to the communities of those that get honored that way.

But Commissioner Hall had spent over 45 years in the elected office here in Mississippi and served the state both in the legislature, as well as at the Department of Transportation. He’s our longest serving commissioner in the history of the department. So, he had a legacy of service that set him apart, having been a member of the House of Representatives, a member of the Senate, and leadership in both of those positions, as well as our longtime chairman.

And so, with the welcome center being a property of the Department of Transportation and something that primarily is used to showcase Mississippi and what we have to offer and, and doing just what’s in the title - welcoming people into the state and trying to give them a taste of what we offer - by giving his name to the welcome center that will reside in his hometown, where he was born in Vicksburg, I think is a very special honor of not just in a tribute way to his legacy and service, but something that would be very meaningful not to his family and to to those of us that loved him and had good relationships with him over the years. So, I think that that’s something that, um, will be a good way of paying tribute to him and something that the department will enjoy, you know, in the future.

(Will) Absolutely.

(Paul) Yeah. Strong legacy. No doubt. Um, so, can we take a little step back and get back to the capacity projects? Would you mind kind of highlighting some of those, those projects?

(Brad) No. So, let me back up to the beginning of how this all started. Governor Reeves, as you will recall, stepped out first and said that he thought with one-time money it should be used on one-time expenses, and that it would be best used to take, instead of starting new projects from scratch that have to go through years of pre-construction work, to go to the other end of that list and look at the projects that we have nearing completion of the pre-construction and becoming shovel-ready, and “let’s fund those, and get them out of the queue and built.” And I thought that made a lot of sense, and luckily, so did the majority of the legislature.

He proposed $1.3 billion in funding that had projects all throughout the state. There was a lot of heavy negotiations. It went back and forth between the House and Senate, the Governor’s Office, and the Department of Transportation over the course of the session. At the end of the day, MDOT is just one of the entities that’s trying to get “food at the trough,” if you will.

There’s a lot of other needs around the state that the, the legislature has to meet. And ultimately, it was decided upon to go with this $450 million figure. And the reason that that’s a good number is, is that takes care of all the projects that we would have ready to let the contract this year, uh, that we didn’t have funded, as well as all the ones that we expect to have ready to let the contract next year, but did not have the funding. So, we’ll be able to get everything out of the way this year and next year and, uh, start building them.

That’s good news for places like Highway 15 and Tippah County, that we hope to go next spring to contract. Highway 2 in that area. We have Highway 19 in Neshoba County that’s been a long-awaited widening project. You have the Flowers Interchange on I-20 between Jackson and Vicksburg that’s a part of that, and Highway 90, uh,in Jackson County and Ocean Springs. That’s a booming area and high growth rate that will be able to be met. Highway 49 in Harrison County, which, you know, all parts of Highway 49 are always in need of upgrade and improvement.

So, this will get a lot of needed projects that otherwise would have been sitting on a shelf waiting for money to come, to try to build them one at a time. So, this allows us to get that whole batch of projects out of the way, and it moves everybody else’s project up the list, and we then have another bite at the apple at the next legislative session, as well as working with the federal delegation to continue to get extra federal funds to help do that. So, it was far more than a shot in the arm for our capacity program.

Now, I will remind everybody that we’re talking about these big major construction projects. This is one part of MDOT’s three-year plan. By them giving us a clean appropriation bill, we will be able to move forward with all the other programs we have - from the four-paving to the operational programs, to the other improvements that will be seen in all 82 counties around the state. So, don’t let this make people think that these are the only counties that will have any type of activity from the Department of Transportation. This does not include the major paving projects that we’ll be doing throughout the state or operational projects or other upgrades that we do.

But, this is the big list of expensive projects that are very thorough and that the funds are sometimes hard to come by. So, I can’t overstate enough of what this will do to the the life of that program within the department and for the communities that they’ll be built in.

(Paul) Definitely good news all around.

(Will) Yeah. That’s right, and all that’s great, uh, we got funding coming in. What about priorities in the nearest, now we’re kind of through the session? What are we focusing on right now?

(Brad) Two things in my mind: number one, we still have a, we’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go, uh, for me to be happy with where we are with our salary adjustments. I think that, that working with the legislature and the State Personnel Board has just been phenomenal to work with over the last year. We’ve made a lot of the adjustments that we needed to make within the system that the legislature set up.

I’m hopeful that we will be able to continue doing that because we still have a ways to go to be sure that we’re paying our engineers and our maintenance techs and our accountants and all the other people, our communication staff, competitive wages that are truly giving them what they need to be able to take care of their families and be sure that we are able to maintain staff. We’ve been able to make enough salary adjustments that, best I can tell, we’ve stopped the bleeding of employees. We’re not losing engineers and maintenance employees at the rate that we used to, but we have a lot of recruitment efforts that we need to make.

The old saying goes, you know, “money may not make you happy, but the lack of it will make you miserable.” So, we want to be sure that we’re paying the type of salaries that allow our employees to make ends meet and to make it worth their while to come to work and motivate them to serve the people in the way that they always have. So, that’s first and foremost been our priority and will continue to be. Proud of where we’ve been, but we’ve got a long way to go with that.

Next, I would say is, uh, reoccurring revenue. We have to talk about how we’re going to to provide for the funding of the transportation system in our state. The taxpayers have around a $65 billion investment of assets that they own, in the way of roads and bridges and other things on the system.

And the fuel tax is just alone not enough to pay for both the maintenance and rehabilitation of that system, along with the, uh, construction of what’s needed in the way of efficiency measures and widening of highways that are over capacity or building of bypasses and so forth. And, as I’ve said before, I’m not suggesting that the answer is just raising the fuel tax. I personally agree with the growth of electric vehicles and with the fuel-operated vehicles being more efficient than they were when I got my driver’s license, that we, we have to look at a broader approach of how do we want to provide for that.

Now, we have a responsibility internally to make sure the money that we have is being used wisely and that there’s not any waste. But at the end of the day, we’ve been very lucky to have these supplemental funds. Sooner or later we’re not going to have supplemental appropriation bills because you can expect that there’s going to be slower economic times sooner or later.

And so, during those times, we need to be sure that there’s some type of funding mechanism in place that will take care of this core function of government. And I’m happy to say that all of our major leaders recognize that. This is a conversation we have with everyone. But, I think it’s coming a time now that we need to start putting pen to paper and coming up with what that solution is.

(Paul) Definitely good that every, that’s on everyone’s mind. So, we have a couple of fun questions, but we did want to mention this. Obviously, there were some pretty terrible storms, uh, in, uh, recent weeks, and, uh, MDOT played a kind of a critical role in clearing the roadways and making sure everyone’s safe. And then we also had some families that were impacted, uh, by these storms. You want to talk about that a little bit?

(Brad) Yeah. Um, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen the photographs and things like that. I mean a lot of the areas around the state - Rolling Fork, Amory and all - were just hit with heavy disaster. We did have some employees that lost their homes. We had some that lost loved ones.

But, you know, I was reminded of Fred Rogers, who when I was a kid did “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”. And he used to give this interview or tell people that when when he was a child, and some traumatic experience would happen in the way of a, you know, a storm or a man-made disaster or whatever, that his mother would always tell, encourage him by telling him, “look for the helpers, because there’s always going to be helpers out there that arrive and that try to deliver the assistance and the love and the compassion that’s needed to assist those people who have been hit hard.”

And what brings so much pride to me is in a situation just like this, the first messages that started coming across my phone were from other MDOT employees that had already started making plans of “How do we get our equipment from our other districts that maybe were not impacted as much up to the districts that need the help?” How do we get personnel there? What are the needs there? Let’s collect everything from shoes to bibles to clothes to toothbrushes, etc.

And I know that, between the MDOT family and our partners in the private sector, that there were literally trailer loads of those type of goods going. Washers and dryers going. Kits that would allow for the workers that were on the scene to be able to take showers that came from our south Mississippi districts that have them just because of how often they have to deal with hurricanes and things like that. MDOT is made up of people who are helpers, every one of them.

And it was just heartbreaking to see the damage and destruction. But, if you have to find that silver lining in a dark cloud like that, is that you’re able to to remember why it is that the Department of Transportation’s such a wonderful place to work and family to belong to, because we take care of each other. And that was made evident across the state, and it made me really proud to be a part of the Department.

(Paul) Very well said.

(Will) Yeah. No doubt. That’s, uh, it was a terrible situation for sure. Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with all those impacted, and certainly, if we can do anything, let us know. To move into a little bit of a lighter, uh, topic here. So, questions that we’ve always asked, or I guess you’re no stranger to it, but some food questions. We like to eat. We like to eat a lot. So, you have a new place maybe you’ve been to, or a favorite?

(Brad) Well, you know, I’m a creature of habit. So, I don’t really branch out much into any new places. So, I’m going to give you my same answers. Martin’s is a good place I like to go and have lunch. But, I was thinking about Creshale’s is another old favorite of mine - a wonderful atmosphere there, and a good place to go have an evening meal.

(Will) It’s a great place. Yeah. I’ve been there many times myself. It’s always freezing in there. I don’t know why they keep it so cold. Paul’s got a piggyback question for you off that one.

(Paul) Oh, absolutely. In Public Affairs we talk about food, and then the next thing would probably be music. So, as we’re wrapping up the session, we’re gonna have a little fun. Who’s your favorite band or musician?

(Brad) All of mine are dead, I’m afraid. I like -

(Paul) It’s okay.

(Brad) - old country, not the new country, but like classic George Jones, Merle Haggard. Um, incidentally those are kind of, I used to always say with Creshale’s, or I say I always said I piggyback this from someone else that said it, that in order to be on the jukebox at Creshale’s, you have to be dead. That most of the people they have there are famous musicians that have long since passed. And, uh, so they kind of house some of my favorite meals, but house some of my favorite music. But, that would be mine.

(Will) Pretty cool.

(Paul) Absolutely. We got a lot of country fans in the division, too, so good stuff. Well, Brad, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you again for setting, for setting us up here again in the Capitol.

(Brad) Sure. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for what y’all do.

(Paul) Absolutely. So, we also want to start thanking some of our guests. So, first off, we’re gonna thank Will’s mom Tasha, my mom Christina for tuning in. Uh, they listen to nearly every episode, probably every episode. So, thanks for tuning in.

(Will) Big shoutout to the moms. For sure.

(Paul) Definitely. We love them all.

(Brad) There’s a new family member by the way -

(Will) Yes. Yes.

(Brad) - you need to mention.

(Will) I will. I will, twofold. Yeah. I’ve been away from the show for a little bit. We had a new baby. Mackenzie James has made her grand entrance to the world a couple weeks ago, and she’s wonderful, healthy, happy. We’re all doing great. Could use a couple more hours of sleep, but everybody knows the routine there.

I will say though, talking about the MDOT family and everything though, I hope that anybody listening to this has the opportunity to experience a work environment like what we do have at MDOT - being out with a baby and a wife who just gave birth and some of those things. Physically, mentally, my load wasn’t that hard at all, you can imagine.

But the folks at the office, you know, they kept everything running wide open as anybody would have guessed, and, you know, kept me in the loop, and kept everything going. So, I just appreciate them so much, want to give a shout out. I hope that everybody has that opportunity at some point in their career. But, yeah. Thank you for the shoutout there, Paul.

(Paul) For sure. Yeah. Great team we have at MDOT. No doubt. So, also want to thank our listeners out there for tuning into The Extra Mile podcast, especially during the legislative session. Lots of episodes. We want to, uh, ask you to follow us on social media - @MississippiDOT is the handle. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Want to thank our producer Katey Hornsby, our editor Drew Hall. They do a ton of work behind the scenes. And remember to drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.