Our View — Molnau needs performance review

The Free Press

September 23, 2007 01:41 am

— If government should be run like a business, a principle we endorse, then Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, head of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, needs a thorough and tough-minded performance review.
Her department was at least partly responsible for the collapse of the I-35W bridge collapse. It knew the bridge was in bad shape, and didn’t act with any kind of sense of urgency to fix it. The emergency management director of her department was off on a business trip when the bridge collapsed and didn’t come back until 10 days later. Her department ignored recommendations that would save Minnesota roads $3 million a year with an investment one-tenth of that. Molnau endorsed a wrongheaded policy that put MnDOT on a starvation diet compared to the needs of the state’s infrastructure, mostly because she was aligned politically with a governor who had a policy of no new investing for needed projects.
She needs to be held accountable for these failings. Molnau needs an honest and tough-love performance review.
That review should come from her boss, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and the public should have access to that review so it isn’t sugar coated.
Of course, a performance review is problematic. Molnau is an elected official who just happens to be in charge of a major department. Because of the politics involved here, her boss does not really have the power of a normal boss. How could a governor ever “fire” his lieutenant governor, elected by the same people who, by the way, voted for him. What we have here is a boss who, realistically, cannot fire his subordinate, however bad her performance.
That’s a system that cannot work and should not be allowed to exist.
When Pawlenty appointed Molnau head of MnDOT, it sounded like an efficiency in government idea. Only now does it look like a system no private business would allow.