Post by Logan on Apr 17, 2016 5:22:30 GMT -6
REPORTS OF THE road bill’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Gov. Nikki Haley has been warning for weeks that the House would kill what once was a road-funding bill if it did anything other than swallow the Senate’s deeply flawed plan whole. And when House leaders unveiled their plan on Tuesday, she ran to her Facebook page to announce the death. (She had just made a similar pronouncement concerning ethics reform, two legislative days before the Senate shocked us all by reviving the income-disclosure requirement she mourned.)
Senate Transportation Chairman Larry Grooms told his colleagues on Wednesday that the House’s vote to require legislative rather than just Senate confirmation of the governor’s appointments to the Transportation Commission “leaves only one conclusion: They do not want a roads bill passed this year.”
It left me with a very different conclusion: The House gave itself some negotiating tools, to increase the chance that the Legislature will be able to reach a compromise that finally enacts the smart reforms to the Transportation Department that the Legislative Audit Council just reminded us we so desperately need.
Read more: www.thestate.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/cindi-ross-scoppe/article72055947.html
Gov. Nikki Haley has been warning for weeks that the House would kill what once was a road-funding bill if it did anything other than swallow the Senate’s deeply flawed plan whole. And when House leaders unveiled their plan on Tuesday, she ran to her Facebook page to announce the death. (She had just made a similar pronouncement concerning ethics reform, two legislative days before the Senate shocked us all by reviving the income-disclosure requirement she mourned.)
Senate Transportation Chairman Larry Grooms told his colleagues on Wednesday that the House’s vote to require legislative rather than just Senate confirmation of the governor’s appointments to the Transportation Commission “leaves only one conclusion: They do not want a roads bill passed this year.”
It left me with a very different conclusion: The House gave itself some negotiating tools, to increase the chance that the Legislature will be able to reach a compromise that finally enacts the smart reforms to the Transportation Department that the Legislative Audit Council just reminded us we so desperately need.
Read more: www.thestate.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/cindi-ross-scoppe/article72055947.html