Welcome in to another edition of The Extra Mile podcast presented by The Mississippi Department of Transportation. I’m your host Paul Katool joined by my co-host Waverly Prince and we are getting into Waverly’s favorite part of the year, the year end and the holidays. What can you tell us about that? I know. I can’t believe 2021 is almost over. Gone. You know lots of traveling is happening during this season so we want you all to stay safe out on the roads so remember to download the MDOT traffic app and follow at MS Dot on Facebook and Twitter to stay connected and in the know about projects, roadwork and more on Mississippi highways. Thank you so much for plugging all of our travel resources. It will be very important over the holiday season.

Today we’ve got a very special guest for the third time on the podcast we have MDOT Executive Director Brad White. He joined us last time for a special edition of the podcast talking about the infrastructure bill. Please go back and listen to that. It’s a great explainer. And of course he was here for his first day on the job to talk to us and so we’re really excited about a conversation with Brad. Yeah. He’s becoming our favorite guest. No doubt. No doubt.

Alright so we’ve got MDOT Executive Director Brad White in the house with us for actually the third time. He joined us for a special episode previously to talk about the infrastructure bill. The first time we had him on it was literally your first day here. Yeah. And I can’t believe it’s been six months. Everyone that works here knows there’s a lot that goes on at MDOT and it really feels that time has flown. Absolutely. So what has your first six months at The Mississippi Department of Transportation been like as Executive Director?

Well in some ways it’s been like coming back home. As you know I worked here before a little over 20 years ago and other ways it’s been like drinking from a fire hose and trying to catch up. All of the staff I can’t say enough good things about everybody has been very patient with me as I try to catch up on what the challenges we’re facing and just the ordinary manner of conducting business but everybody’s been very kind, very supportive. I’m very impressed with our team. It’s much like I remember it. You know in my first tour duty here of having an agency full of really hard-working individuals that know how to do their job and just need to be given the tools and resources and flexibility with which to do it and being a part of a team like that it’s been very enjoyable. So it’s been even better than what I could have imagined.

Yeah so on our first podcast you talked about how when you were going to come in you were going to observe what was going on and how things were working. What are some of the things that you’ve observed in your six months here?

Well you know there’s a lot of good things going on. We do have some challenges as an agency. I feel like that all of the challenges we have can be met and overcome with the appropriate amount of resources with which to do them. That covers a wide range of issues from appropriate and competitive wages for our staff and our team being able to provide our people with the compensation that would allow for them to reach for the American dream and support their families and do all the things that all of us want to do.

But also having the resources as an agency to carry out our mission of providing an efficient and effective transportation system in all the various modes of transportation. And looking at the decline of revenue. Looking at the funding gaps that we have on taking care of the existing investment of the taxpayers. Those are all things that I hope by working with our friends in the legislature we can come up with a plan that would allow for us to have the ability to better address those and catch up on those needs and be able to continue doing the work that MDOT’s done. So overall that’s been the biggest challenges that I see. We don’t have a lack of talent. We don’t have a lack of hard working people. We just need to have the resources and tools with which to do the job that everybody’s been hired to do.

So I know we’ve talked about it in the special episode but can you talk briefly about the infrastructure bill and kind of what that means for Mississippi? And again if you want to listen to more about this you can listen to the last episode.

Yeah. I would start off by saying again that it’s very important for those that may not know to understand what the infrastructure was not as much as it is what it was. What it was not was another economic stimulus package of money that was sent to the state with a focus on traditional infrastructure. As far as the Department of Transportation goes this was primarily nothing more than our normal reauthorization five-year authorization of our federal partners allowing for federal highway to continue to work with us and carrying out you know their mission.

So the good news is we were expecting based on the last five years around 2.6 billion dollars over five years. We ended up getting three point three billion over the next five years so we did have a plush up of additional funds. But all of that money still has to be spent in accordance with the rules and regulations of federal highway.

There were some new programs that were introduced in the legislation that would allow for us to begin looking at building charging stations for electric vehicles around the state, putting a plan together in order to do that in a common sense effective way that would develop some corridors to which people can be relieved of anxiety of driving one of those and worrying about where they would be able to juice up.

And then there are plush up in some of our other modes of transportation from public transit to aeronautics of money made available for the ports in the state money more money made available for rail in our state and being able to administer those I think can be a very positive thing for the state of Mississippi as a whole. We’re still waiting on some of the rules and regulations to come down to know how we can spend it.

But again the good news is it’s a good bill in a sense we’ve got more money to put at the desperate needs we have around the state. The bad news is that money is not just a free pot that we’re able to spend however we want. So it’s going to be very important that the commissioners work with our legislative leadership and the governor to be sure that as these plans are developed and moving forward that no action has taken that would have some type of unintended consequence.

And then you talked about a little earlier about the skill and talent of our people. And can you talk a little bit about how those skills really helped with the State Route 26 and that a major emergency repair job that was just completed.

Sure. Absolutely. I mean that roadway is now open for traffic and we would not have it to this place where traffic was able to flow on that without the work of the people inside The Department of Transportation. A lot of the pre-construction work was done. We did have some consultants that helped us on different aspects. But the participation and work done by MDOT staff contributed greatly to our ability to get the roadway back open as soon as we did.

If you go back and look at the 1987 Four Lane Program a lot of the positive things that were done with that program was due to the fact that MDOT had a staff 30 plus years ago that was able by and large to do most of the pre-construction work in-house. And it allowed for that to move at a good cost of the tax to the taxpayers and allowed those projects to move more quickly. If we had to implement a program such as the ‘87 Four Lane Program today I don’t know if we’re capable of doing that without the aid of consultants.

And so that goes back to the need we’re talking about before in working with our state leaders to make sure that we have the resources to pay competitive wages to retain and maintain the professional staff that we need. And by doing that and convincing our leaders and showing them and we have evidence just like this project you’re talking about and others that when we invest the state’s resources in our people in that way it always comes back as a savings and a better service to the taxpayer. And so that’s just one of many examples we have that would backup that mindset.

Brad, Thanks so much and we’ll pick things back up right after the break.

Brad, six months in and we’ve got something major coming up the legislative session. It’s about a month away. Obviously you have a background and kind of dealing with the political side of things like that. What are you kind of expecting coming down the pipeline in January starting in January?

I feel like we’re in a good place with our legislative leadership. We have a very good relationship with most people over there. I think most every one of our leaders on both sides of the aisle recognize the importance of transportation to our overall economy, recognize that it is a core function of government and want to work with us to be sure that we’re doing what the taxpayers would expect from us.

We’ve had positive conversations already in recognizing that with more federal money being made available through federal highways programs that means we’re going to need more state money in order to make the match necessary to get the money. Both the lieutenant governor and the speaker have indicated to me that they’re more than willing to try to find that money within the state surplus in order to pay it so it doesn’t come out of our traditional budget. That’s going to be a savings of around a 165 million dollars over the next five years if we’re able to work that out. Working with them on a lot of other efficiency measures that were identified through a performance audit that I think you may be familiar with that was done mandated by the legislature a couple years back. It showed a lot that MDOT did very well.

And most of the areas where there could be improvement we need legislative assistance in being able our authority in order to make those improvements. So we’ve been meeting with them about those ways that we could improve the efficiency of the agency and all with the end goal being to free up more money that we already have in order to put it back into investing within our people and within the different modes of transportation that we’re supposed to be taking care of.

So I think it’s going to be fast and furious. You know the art of legislating requires a lot of patience. It’s going to be a long process. But I am very confident in our ability to carry our needs to the legislature and have a meaningful conversation with the members of about how to best address the needs that we have and how to how to partner with them to be sure that we’re doing what we need to do to be best equipped moving forward.

And let’s kind of talk about you know we talked about the last six months but let’s talk about long term. What kind of goals, objectives do you have for MDOT?

Well again first things first. I don’t think that we can move forward with much of anything without making sure that we’re taking care of our staff. I’m very serious when I tell others that the biggest challenge that we as an agency have has nothing to do with the funding gaps that we may be experiencing. It has everything to do with being able to recruit and maintain professionals in all different levels in our agency.

Being able to have the flexibility under the state personnel board and the authority from the legislature to allocate funds to salaries that will be competitive in some way to the private sector. And it will allow for our people to have meaningful wages is of the utmost importance. And I don’t know that I will really be much interested in moving much further beyond that until we’re able to see that accomplished because it does us no good to be given all of these other tools if we’re not given the ability to maintain and build the team necessary to use the tools in order to have the transportation system.

When you look around what the private sector is or are facing right now its very popular for people to say that government should be run like a business but government functions much differently than a business. We’ve got contractors now that in order to keep up with the things that are going on in our national economy have had to give out three different raises in one particular case over the last calendar year in order to hold onto their staff. We’re prohibited from being able to do those sort of thing right now. And we must be able to address that desperate need and better equip our staff financially if we’re going to have any type of team necessary in order to implement all the things that the taxpayers and the legislature and the commission and the governor expect us to do.

That’s just you talk to any military leader and they will tell you the most important thing is taking care of your soldiers. And I believe that’s our primary thing both in the near term and the long term is being sure that we’re doing that. Aside from that I think that even with the extra money that we’re getting through this infrastructure bill keep in mind we’re getting an extra we might as well say billion dollars over five years. We have over four and a half billion dollars worth of capacity needs already on our Vision 21 list. We’re running a 400 million dollar funding gap every year on our rehabilitation needs. A 50 million a year gap on our bridge needs.

So long term having a meaningful conversation yet again about how are we going to fund the building and the maintaining of our transportation system is of utmost importance. Fuel tax has been relatively level with the growth of electric vehicles and delivery brought by drone and the more efficiency measures of the automobile now. I don’t think that fuel tax is going to be as reliable a source of funding is as what it’s been regardless of the amount which has been charged. So we have to have some type of beginning of a real conversation where we discuss how are we going to generate the money necessary to do what we need.

A lot of that’s going to be you know by freeing up money inside by being more efficient where we can. A lot of that is going to be applying more data-driven common-sense approach to what projects we build and maintain as opposed to letting politics drive those things. And then another part of that will be trying to determine how do we count on a reliable source of income in the years to come to provide for all of that. So I may have went a long way around the barn in answering your question but I don’t mean to oversimply it but those are two very big challenges that I don’t think will be fixed overnight. We certainly are taking steps in that direction and I don’t want to be discouraging and when I talk about those challenges because we are addressing them and I think we are making headway in a wonderful way. But we’ve come a long way but we’ve still got a long way to go.

What has to happen to get those competitive wages for MDOT employees?

Part of that is happening now. The state personnel board is changing their system to what is called SEC Squared and it is designed as my understanding to allow agencies more flexibility in how they hire and maneuver staff within the government system. And by being given more flexibility where we don’t necessarily have a set salary that we pay and we’re able to do much like the private sector and move within ranges I think is a great step forward in allowing for that. The other part of that is having the money available to dedicate to where once we have the authority and the flexibility to have the money to put into those holes. And I feel like that’s something we can accomplish. But you got to deal with first things first.

So we’ll see how everything rolls out in January SEC Squared. I don’t want to bore everybody with all the specifics about it but our staff have worked collectively across the board to be sure that we’re communicating with the personnel board and providing them all the needed information to put our best foot forward. I’m very confident that we’re going to come out of this with being much better equipped to take care our staff. I’m not so overconfident to believe that it’s going to fix all of our problems. I think we’ll still have some things that we need to deal with but such is life.

Brad, Thanks so much for coming in. We really appreciate your time and hope to talk to you soon.

That was another great episode with MDOT Executive Director Brad White. Before we get out of here we want to thank our producer Katey Hornsby and our editor Drew Hall for all their wonderful work on this podcast. And remember that you can listen to past episodes of The Extra Mile podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and we would love it if you would subscribe and download.

For sure and remember to tune into our social media accounts because we’re going to be having a special announcement up podcast soon. You won’t want to miss it. And of course as always remember to drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.