MDOT's Butch Brown to Sun Herald: stop "kicking our ass"

"I think you ought to back off of MDOT and start saying thank you instead of kicking our ass." MDOT Executive Director Butch Brown to the Sun Herald.

Butch Brown apparently thinks the press should only do public relations and not hold government accountable.

Well, we'll thank-you. Thank-you Mr. Brown for taking our tax payer dollars and buildling new offices. Thank-you Mr. Brown for using my tax money on trips around the world. Thank-you Mr. Brown for planning to rip-up Church Street in Port Gibson because you don't want to do a bypass. Thank-you so much, Mr. Brown, for running MDOT for us because really, we could never find anyone else to do it for us.

The Sun Herald shares MDOT's attempt to counter the sunshine the press puts on how MDOT spends our money.

The Mississippi Department of Transportation recently charged the Sun Herald nearly $1 a page for travel-expense reports for four state highway officials, compared with 25 cents a page for the same kind of records in 2008.

The newspaper was billed a total of $511 for the records, which included a 25 cent per page charge to copy the 538 pages. The total, officials said, also included paying a software consultant $250 to "develop a program" for identifying the records.

Really? To develop a program to identify the records? So until the Sun Herald asked for it, MDOT had no idea how much they were spending on travel! They couldn't because they didn't have a system to answer that question. That sounds like bad management to us.

There was also a $90 charge for a clerk to pull and copy the documents, and $36 for an auditor to review the records. MDOT said the auditor worked for an hour looking for missing receipts and documentation.

Hold on. They charged for an auditor to find "missing receipts and documentation." So MDOT has a practice of paying for travel without receipts or documentation. That appears to be the process because otherwise, they wouldn't have to look for them. And apparently, MDOT's auditors don't get receipts or documentation as part of their normal job activities or else they wouldn't need to charge the Sun Herald for doing it. So tack on bad auditing to bad management, or it could be just part of it.

The Sun Herald made a request for travel records in late 2008, in which MDOT was asked for travel-expense reports for about four years' worth of travel records for the same four officials.

MDOT turned over the four years' worth of documents for the officials, but charged only 25 cents a page for nearly 1,700 pages of records. There was no additional charge for computer software, clerks and auditors in the records released in 2008.

So that means in the past two years, MDOT has actually gotten LESS effective. It costs four times as much to make a copy, not to mention paying someone to write software as well as clerks and auditors to do what it seems like they should be doing already.

Director Butch Brown said he doesn't believe the Sun Herald should be looking into the travel costs for him and the commission

I wonder why?