It's one of the biggest games of political chicken played out in Georgia in a long time... so the question is, will the state legislature blink?

Last Thursday the Georgia Department of Transportation board voted to fire DOT Commissioner Gena Evans after just 14 months on the job. To understand what will transpire over the next few weeks let's look at how we got here.

The DOT board is made up of one member from each of Georgia's 13 congressional districts. These board members are elected by the state legislators whose own districts are located inside a particular congressional district. For example, Bartow County is in the 11th Congressional district. So our state house members and state senators along with the others from inside the 11th district voted to elect David Doss of Rome as our DOT Board Member.

Gena Evans was the pick of Governor Sonny Perdue to be DOT Commissioner. The DOT board voted to hire Evans by a vote of 7 to 6 instead of choosing Speaker Glenn Richardson's choice, State Representative Vance Smith. This was a pitched battle and several State House members were punished by the Speaker for how they played the game.

Evans came in and starting cleaning house... exposing numerous problems within the agency and cracking down on what she considered incompetence... especially in regard to accounting methods used. This caused a dramatic slowdown in road construction projects as Evans and her staff tried to untangle the mess at DOT. This rattled a DOT board that was being pressured by the business community and local officials to get various road projects underway.

While this was all boiling under the surface, Governor Perdue, Speaker Glenn Richardson, and Lt. Governor Casey Cagle put together a proposal to consolidate Georgia's transportation future in the hands of one state agency, and that agency was not the DOT. Instead the Department of Transportation would be downsized and its responsibilities reduced to just maintenance and operations... not construction projects.

The icing on the cake is the future of almost one billion dollars of transportation money included in the recently passed federal economic stimulus bill that is headed to Georgia.

So last week's firing of Commissioner Gena Evans was the DOT board's way of punishing Governor Perdue for daring to move forward with his plan for reducing the role of the DOT in Georgia's transportation future.

In a DOT board press release last Thursday announcing that Evans was being replaced, two things caught my eye. One was the DOT board's message that they will be putting plans in place for spending that one-billion dollars in federal transportation money... this was a direct challenge to Governor Perdue, Cagle and Richardson, for if the state legislature approves the new realignment of state transportation agencies, then that one-billion dollars would be handled by the new agency instead of DOT... and the leadership of this new agency would be appointed by Perdue, Cagle, and Richardson.

The second issue is that DOT board members know they are in a political dogfight, so in desperation they played the race card. The person they named to replace Gena Evans is black. No problem there, if Gerald Ross is the most qualified person to run the DOT that's fine by me. However, instead of focusing on Mr. Ross's qualifications and visio... the press release focused almost entirely on the fact that Ross was the first black chosen as DOT commissioner. This was a calculated play, knowing that black legislators and most Democrat members of the General Assembly would not vote for Perdue's plan to shift power and funding away from a DOT that would now be headed by a minority. This was pure race based politics and it's shameless.

There's a lot of arm-twisting going on behind the scenes and the future of transportation in Georgia is dependent upon the outcome.

That's my opinion, we welcome yours. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next Monday... for a complete transcript of this morning's comments, go to NewsTalk1270.com (End of complete transcript of commentary that aired on NewsTalk AM 1270 - WYXC at 7:35 AM Monday, March 2, 2009