Around The Rotunda: Almost like it never happened

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Auditor Mike Foley had harsh  words last month for the way University of Nebraska officials reacted to requests for information, and he said them on Lincoln radio station KLIN.

The words were documented. But now no one wants to talk about it. Not Foley. Not university officials. Not even talk show host Coby Mach.

Foley, who usually likes to elaborate, said no thanks, he didn’t “want to go there.” 

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Mach said he, too, had nothing to add.

 Foley’s comments centered around his request for financial documents on the William Ayers invitation to speak at an NU academic conference.

The university “totally blew it off,” he said, pretending the request didn’t happen.

When he finally got the information, he said, officials said they were mistaken. Public money was involved after all. 

“They claim it was an error,” he told Mach’s audience. “I think it was a deliberate manipulation of the truth.”

He went on, saying it wasn’t the first time it had happened.

“There’s   an attitude at the university that they are somehow special, that they don’t have to answer questions about how they use the half billion dollars that they receive every year from the taxpayers of Nebraska,” Foley said.

He has filed multiple requests for information on a number of different issues there, and they “delay, delay, delay” and sometimes give him half the information he’s seeking, he said.

“I’ve seen them even manipulate documents and alter documents that they provide,” he alleged.

Foley criticized the “lawyering” going on at the university, saying it had to stop. 

 “In my experience in this office, the more lawyers you have, the more wrongdoing there’s likely to be.”

Foley said university officials had a “sophomoric attitude toward government and have no respect whatsoever for the taxpayer of Nebraska.”

Go there?

Seems too late for that. 

No more piecemeal widening: When the state starts adding lanes to the interstate west of Lincoln, the widening from four to six lanes will start at Lincoln and move westward one mile at a time.

It will not repeat the hopscotch pattern of I-80 widening we've seen between Lincoln and Omaha.  

This is one case were hindsight is 20/20, said Roads Department Director  John Craig during a discussion on I-80 widening at a recent Nebraska Highway Commission meeting.

The timing of the projects between Omaha and Lincoln  were based on building from both ends — Omaha and Lincoln — towards the middle, according to Monty Fredrickson, the department's deputy director for engineering

That will not be repeated going westward,  Instead, the state is likely to bite off nine or 10 miles at a time, he said. 

However, work  on the interstate west of Lincoln is not expected to begin anytime soon because of uncertain funding, not need.   “You guys have driven from York to Lincoln and know it (I-80) is busy,” Fredrickson told  western commissioners. Current traffic volumes will justify an additional lane within the next 20 years, he said.

But, because of  uncertain funding, current state priorities include maintenance of the current highway system and completing the I-80 widening to Lincoln.

There are 25,000 vehicles a day already at Seward, he said. “I would expect the traffic to reach 36,000 before 20 years.”  It would be nice to find the money "to get six lanes built before traffic has to creep along at 30 mph."    

Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com. Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.