Private road is no answer for the public

News that a private company wants to "help" Walton County by widening U.S. 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay Bridge should give citizens pause.

This private company wants to turn U.S. 331 into a widened private toll road. That means motorists would be at the mercy of largely unregulated price increases to use a road and bay bridge they now drive on for free.

The proposal comes from a company founded by Denver Stutler, who served as Gov. Jeb Bush's chief of staff and then as Bush's Department of Transportation secretary. Stutler's company approached the Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority Feb. 17 with an "unsolicited proposal" to "design, build, operate, and finance transportation facilities which will provide additional capacity for U.S. 331 in Walton County."

It is curious how this proposal just popped up out of nowhere. Developer Jay Odom, whose 3,000-acre Hammock Bay development in Freeport would benefit from a pricey new road, was quoted in the Northwest Daily News as saying "In my book, this is a stimulus package. It's a half-billion-dollar stimulus that's not reliant on federal dollars."

Really? A quick look at Florida DOT documents shows that Highway 331 is already teed up for federal stimulus dollars. On the DOT's official "Ready-To-Go" list of state projects eligible for federal stimulus money, there's more than $336 million worth of improvements to Highway 331 and the Choctawhatchee Bay bridge, right there, listed plain as day. Walton County is listed as an officially designated economically distressed area which gives it higher priority for funding.

Citizens should be asking whether this private company intends to draw down public money for private gain. It is doubtful that these corporate folks are doing this expensive road work to be altruistic to the good folks of Walton County. And what will the citizens end up paying in the long run?

Odom is The Northwest Florida Transportation Corridor Authority's vice chairman. This appointed group, established by Jeb Bush, has spent four years drawing routes for fat new toll roads through our region. So far, this group - which is independent of the state DOT and has the power to tax, seize private land through eminent domain, and set up toll authorities - has spent $4 million worth of public money and has not had annual audits as required by law.

In fact, the NFTCA is the only transportation authority in the state that has not had its required audits. Right now, the DOT's inspector general is working up balance sheets for the authority, but this does not constitute formal auditing - outside audits are specifically required.

Most all of the money spent so far has gone to the private HDR Engineering, which is doing planning for the road and collecting a profit in the meantime. Invoices show that about $3.9 million has gone to pay hefty engineering fees to do master planning for the new roads. Still, when pressed by the public, the NFTCA insists that people shouldn't get attached to the lines on the map that this $4 million worth of public money paid for. These lines drawn through our communities, they tell us, are still just "concepts." After four years and $4 million, we've still only got concepts?

Now, all of a sudden, a private company waltzes in with this very suspicious-looking proposal to "help" Walton County, as Tom McLaughlin of the Northwest Daily News reported on Feb. 20:

"The authority, never having received an unsolicited proposal, had to set a fee to submit such documents. It settled on a tentative charge of $50,000. That money will be used to advertise the proposal and to notify other potential bidders of its existence. Once advertisements are published, other firms that might be interested in competing for the project have 60 days to provide proposals."

Sixty days for other companies to come up with a competing proposal for a road project this large and complex? None of this sounds right.

It's worth noting that about $105,800 of the $4 million that the transportation authority spent so far went to HDR Engineering to pay for "public outreach" between May and November of 2007. That's $17,633 per month.

I wish some of that "public outreach" money would go toward letting the citizens really know what's going on here.

Clean Water Network of Florida is a network of 300 organizations working together to protect Florida's streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries.