ALC-Highway Commission Review and Advisory Subcommittee
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Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
10:00
Chair, seats of quorum, let's go ahead and get the meeting started today. If everybody could
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
10:28
go ahead and take their seats. Senator, you're recognized. Thank you so very much. Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow at 3.30, Philander Smith College invites all members of the General Assembly as well as staff to a reception honoring you at 3.30 p.m. at Philander Smith College on 14th Street.
I think most of you know where it is. You see it on the freeway when you come in. We'd appreciate it very much if you would come. That includes our staff, Mickey,
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
11:08
a.k.a. Billy. Thank you. It's a great event. Thank you for the reminder. All right, with that, we're going to go ahead and get things started. We have a report, just kind of an overview of the Amendment 42, the Arkansas Constitution.
Speaker 5
11:21
And with that, we'll let you come over. All right, Ms.
Speaker 16
11:46
Porter, or Torres-Porter. All right, and you are recognized. Thank you. All right, good afternoon. Diane Torres-Porter,
Speaker 17
11:49
legislative attorney for the Bureau of Legislative Research, and I'm going to give you an overview of Amendment 42 of the Arkansas Constitution.
Amendment 42, also known as the Mack Blackwell Amendment, Section 1, it creates the State Highway Commission for the purpose of administering the Arkansas Department of Transportation, and the powers and duties given for that purpose come from the General Assembly. Section 2 requires that the governor appoint five commissioners, one from each congressional district at large. Section 3 states that the commissioners serve staggered 10-year terms. Section 4 provides that the governor may remove commissioners under certain circumstances, and the Senate may do so
after a hearing. Section 5 provides that the vacancies in the commission may be filled by the governor within 30 days under certain circumstances. If the governor does not fill those vacancies, then the remaining commissioners may do so. Section 6 requires that the commission appoint the director of highways. The duties of the director are granted by the commission in conjunction with the laws granted by the General Assembly. Would you mind just pulling your
Speaker 19
13:03
Excuse me. Oh, you're fine. I'm sorry. Is that better?
Speaker 17
13:13
Actually, here we go. Better? Senator, you good? Good? Thank you. So the commission has been referred to as an independent constitutional agency, and due to that, there are misconceptions regarding its power and the power of the General Assembly. However, Section 1 of Amendment 42 provides the Commission's purpose and the powers granted to the Commission. The Commission is created for the purpose of administering the Arkansas Department of Transportation and the powers granted
are those necessary to carry out the laws that are relating to the department. The underlying language that you see states imposed by law, which means that the powers and the duties given to the Commission for the administration of the department come from the General Assembly. What are the constitutional powers and duties granted to the State Highway Commission? As we've already stated, the Commission's purpose is to administer the Arkansas Department of Transportation, and the powers granted are those necessary to carry out the laws
relating to the department. The Commission also has the power to employ officers and employees, it's required to appoint the director of highways, and it also provides the duties for the director. Changes to these powers and duties require a constitutional amendment. What are the constitutional powers and duties granted to the General Assembly? Section 1 and 6 of the constitutional amendment grant that the General Assembly has the power to grant or withdraw the powers and duties of the Commission, the Department, and of the
Director of Highways. This assertion is also supported by case law. In Pritchett, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that a separation of powers violation did not occur when the General Assembly abolished an agency and a board and then transferred their duties to the Commission and the department. In its opinion, the court notes that the General Assembly's delegation did not violate the separation of powers requirement due to the legislature's power to control the agency by its ability to grant powers and authorities or to withdraw them. In its opinion, the court actually points in its argument to the
language of amendment 42 section 1 as required the General Assembly has set out the powers and duties of the Commission in statute 27 65 107 and the types of powers and duties that have been given include the construction and maintenance of the state highway system and the letting of contracts for that purpose compliance with federal aid programs creation of budget requests and expert expenditure programs and the administration of special programs run by the Department. As authorized, the General Assembly has also granted the
Department jurisdiction over various modes of transportation and the the laws regarding those modes of transportation can be found throughout the Arkansas Code. The General Assembly may add, amend, or remove these powers and duties, the ones granted to the Commission and to the Department of Transportation. And thank you and
Speaker 16
16:09
and I'll answer any questions you may have. Thank you very
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
16:13
much for the presentation do we have any questions from members so just one and I just want
to make sure I understand the court case so the court case that doesn't have anything to do with the highway department but it does that just have to do with the powers delegated to the legislature or the General Assembly and what they're able to do and not do is that I mean is that and so that's where the relationship exists because we have that we were given the authority in the constitution to create the laws necessary to for the highway department to function
Speaker 17
16:48
in a way yes sir but I mean in the case if they actually are transferring the duties of these of the agency and the board that were abolished
to the Commission and to the department and then they said that yes I mean the the General Assembly has the power to grant and withdraw okay all right thank you thank you we have any other questions All
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
17:21
right, up next, we have an update from Guide House on the study of the Arkansas, or RDOT.
All right, good to see you all again, and just please recognize yourself for the committee and you're
Speaker 28
17:49
welcome to proceed. Good afternoon, members of the committee. I'm Erin Hutchins. I'm a director with Guidehouse State and Local
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
18:01
Government. Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me? Nope. How about now? There we go. Hi, my name is Sagar Gokhale. I'm a manager with Guidehouse in the
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
18:11
State and Local Government practice. Good afternoon. thank you all for having us here this afternoon our update is related again to the review of
Speaker 37
18:17
rdot we have provided the committee with and the blr staff with our work plan for this project oh there we go the work plan is essentially the project management plan that will follow for delivery of this assessment it is materially like the proposal so i believe you all have a copy of that it should look familiar to you for those of you that reviewed the proposal there are however
a couple of changes that we just want to review with you very quickly today and we have a full presentation that we can go through with you but in the interest of time we're going to focus again on those changes, a little bit of a timeline update, and then also some next steps. Shall we move on? Oh, we already did. It's just not here. Technology is my friend, really. Okay, so what's going to be really funny is when I talk to you about the staffing changes and my technology background. All right, so the first thing is with respect to the activities
and the deliverables for the project the deliverables within the work plan as compared to the proposal are all the same with respect to the activities those are materially the same as well with one exception we had originally in the proposal talked about doing a kind of cross oh yes I'm sorry go ahead I'm trying to find where you are in
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
19:46
the written document but it's not the same it is not the same
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
19:50
so they have a summary that's in a slide so show presentation summarization
and not right exactly yeah we did not print out the the summary but
we have the total just make sure you're paying attention today
Speaker 37
20:05
all right thank you i will say there is a summary of those changes in the document although i can't tell you what page specifically they're on there yeah but it yes it doesn't look like this sure thank you um so again the activities are materially the same with the exception of our proposal indicating that we would be doing kind
of some cross-functional shadowing with the rdot team and as we kind of worked through the project planning um and and in discussions with you all last month um and some of our other you know kind of document review of publicly available documents, what we decided was that it was better for us to do some surveying of RDOT employees and to do some additional interviews with the RDOT employees so that we could get a better geographical representation of the RDOT team as compared to
sitting in the HQ office and hanging out with them and watching them do their work. so that's really what has changed with respect to the activities and deliverables from a staffing perspective there have been a handful of changes that we want to you know what can you can you get us from here to the org charts sorry I don't know maybe not okay I'm going to walk through those from my memory then we had in our original proposal a member of our capital projects and
investment team he is no longer oh thank you he is no longer with the guide house team and the person that took over for him was really serving as a subject matter expert and he is now a quality partner on our project and so he's going to take a more active role in the project when that changed we also moved one of our subject matter experts who again was really going to be in a supporting role into a lead role in reviewing RDOT activities. And so she's bringing a lot more
expertise and leadership from a capital projects and investment and transportation department experience to the project than we originally had proposed. I cut a joke a moment ago about my own IT experience. I have 20 years of digital government experience, so I come from an IT background. And one of the things that we understand about the department is that they're undergoing a series of IT enhancements. And so having someone with a better understanding of an IT environment was an important part of the project. So I've been added to the project as a
project leader. Otherwise, the team is the same. So we just want to make you aware of, oh, one more change. We also have brought in our analytics team. So the RDOT group has given us many, many many documents as well as raw machine readable data the great thing about that machine readable data is that we're able to take data elements from different systems and build our
own comparisons and analysis of those things that are that may be different than the way that RDOT is looking at that data so that is going to I think add real benefit to the project overall so those are the staffing changes that we have made and then finally we've done a little bit of a project timeline change. When we originally put the project together, we anticipated a five and a half month project, which is essentially what we're doing. However, when we came last month, we thought that might be what was going to be our kickoff. And because of availability of our team
and the RDOT team, we haven't really effectively kicked off the project until this week. So basically the project kickoff starts now and we'll be working that five and a half month schedule starting this week and delivering our reports in the spring, and Sagar's going to review the actual timeline with you now. And let's see. No?
Chair
Unverified
24:17
I think we might need a little... No, it's not. No,
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
24:38
even that's not doing it. Senator, you're recognized for a question. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. As I'm looking
through the overview and your deliverables, this will not include an assessment of those projects that the department is undertaking.
Speaker 37
24:49
so we actually are reviewing the um projects that they have in in in process we're reviewing some of
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
24:59
their procurement materials project reports those those sorts of things so you're dealing with procurement part not necessarily dealing
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
25:06
with for instance they're supposed to fix i-30 sometimes in a lifetime so you're not going to look at that you're going to look at the procurement process itself how this is how it's determined who with whom they will do business
that sort of thing but not the determination of whether this project is worthy or
Speaker 37
25:27
not yeah we're not making any evaluations of the the prioritization or worth of projects really looking through processes that's clarifying thank you mr chair thank
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
25:37
you and for a little clarification though but you will be looking at how rdott prioritizes projects you're just not going to be weighing in on
Speaker 37
25:47
does that make sense yes yes we are we are looking through processes and procedures including portfolio management and prioritization procedures but they're not
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
25:54
going to be in the politics of prioritizing projects in a
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
25:57
report that's so helpful because we really do need i-30 done thank you all right
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
26:05
so uh as aaron mentioned you know we're happy to answer any questions related to our approach and we had a number of slides related to that so we can come back to that. I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the project activities that we've completed so far since we've started and then also discuss a couple concrete next steps so you have an understanding of what our timeline looks like in the next 30
and 60 days. So in terms of our activities so far, we've completed a number in three buckets, so interviews, document review, and also some status reporting. In terms of interviews, we We conducted our RDOT kickoff with the leadership team actually on Monday, on Monday afternoon, and Aaron talked about that. We've already conducted 14 interviews with the leadership team since that kickoff on Monday afternoon, and we're hoping to meet with the Arkansas Legislative Black Caucus as soon as that availability is provided.
So we've had a number of interviews already. In terms of document review, we've already reviewed 23 publicly available sets of documents, and those span the focus areas that we talked about when we were here last month. So portfolio planning, expenditures, organizational structure of the department and personnel, and some of their procurement processes as well. And that helped inform some of our conversations and interviews that we had over the last couple days. And then the last piece is status reporting.
One of the items that we've identified in our project work plan is a project management support and reporting structure. and so to date we've already created and submitted five weekly status updates to the project management team and so we've been working with Jill and Billy on those on reporting our status updates and we'll continue to do that on a weekly basis throughout this project so that you all are aware of the progress that we're making in this engagement and to ensure also that you know you're
also getting what you need out of our particular study at the same time so you get those weekly touch points. We've conducted that kickoff meeting, as I mentioned earlier, and we've also had two briefings with the project governance team, and right now that's with the subcommittee co-chairs. So we've had those two meetings already, one just a little bit earlier this afternoon. So that's what we've accomplished to date.
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
28:28
Thank you for the presentation. Do you have any questions? Any discussion by the members
about the project plan? All right. Seeing none, thank you both
very much for your time today. Thank you. Members, do we
have any other business before us? All right. Seeing none, our next meeting will be November 13th, and it will be to review the quarterly construction progress report. And with that, we are adjourned. Thank you very much for your time.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Overview of Amendment 42 of the Arkansas Constitution
C. Update from Guidehouse LLP on study of the Arkansas Department of Transportation
D. Other Business
E. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ALC-HIGHWAY COMMISSION REVIEW AND ADVISORY SUBCOMMITTEE, Oct 16, 2019 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex B - Amendment42 | Exhibit | 7 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex C - ARDOT Project Work Plan_10162019 PDF | Exhibit | 40 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
Senator Linda Chesterfield
Unverified
Speaker 5
Speaker 16
Speaker 17
Speaker 18
Speaker 19
Speaker 28
Sagar Gokhale
Unverified
Senator Missy Irvin
Unverified
Speaker 37
Chair
Unverified