Mike Carroll, the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), follows a simple, straightforward formula for success.
“I empower smart people,” he explained. “When you become the Secretary of an agency as large as PennDOT, populated with over 10,000 employees, the skill level of the engineers all the way down to mechanics and drivers is exceptional. As turnover occurs with retirements and such, elevating smart people to a new position and empowering them to make decisions in the interest of the 13 million Pennsylvanians is sort of a guiding light for me.”
Deploying that intellectual capital differently across diverse communities has proven a successful strategy. “We have really smart, capable people,” Carroll said. “We have a very diverse state — 67 counties, from the most urban to the most rural — and I want people to be able to make decisions that reflect the nature of the challenges in each community.”
Carroll, who also chairs the state’s Transportation Commission as well as the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, was first elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 2006 and subsequently re-elected for seven additional terms. He worked on transportation throughout his time in public office, having also served as Democratic Chairman of the House Transportation Committee from 2018 to 2022. His resume also includes stints as Chief of Staff for then-State Representative John Yudichak, Legislative Liaison for PennDOT under then-Governor Robert Casey, and District Office Director for Congressman Paul Kanjorski.
Carroll leaves no doubt as to who has been one of the greatest influences on his professional life. Thomas Tigue, a Marine Corps Colonel who served in Vietnam and spent 26 years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, encouraged Carroll to run upon his own retirement.
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“When a Marine Corps Colonel tells you to run, you run,” Carroll said. “Representative Tigue was somebody I had known my entire life and somebody who really was influential in developing the skill set that I have in terms of my professional career.”
Undergirding that skill set is a laudable work ethic. A typical week includes two or three days in Harrisburg and two or three somewhere else across the state.
“The days can be long,” Carroll said. “I try not to stay in Harrisburg and isolate myself. I want to be visible and interact with the PennDOT folks and our customers where they are. It’s very common for me to come to counties that some of my predecessor secretaries may not have been to very often.”
Carroll said that his greatest personal challenge in his current post is “just trying to juggle all the requests for my time that come before me. In my prior role as a House member, I was sort of an independent contractor. With an agency as large as PennDOT, with 13 million customers, it’s impossible to do retail for all the things that come before you, and so I have had to adjust the way I operate and make sure I empower smart people to do things on my behalf.”
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As 2024 nears its end, Carroll’s priority remains enhancing the transportation network to the extent possible with the resources at his disposal. “We have been successful with the governor’s leadership,” he said. “Governor [Josh] Shapiro’s assignment to me was to decouple the $500 million that PennDOT was providing to the Pennsylvania State Police so we could [use] it in the transportation network.”
In two years, the agency has been successful in decoupling $250 million ($125 million each year). Those additional monies go directly into the state’s transportation network, specifically the highway and bridge programs. Combined with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) funds from the Federal Transportation Bill, Carroll pointed out that “it has made a meaningful difference in terms of the projects we can deliver and the things we can do with a very large transportation network, compared to our sister states.”
According to Carroll, the benefits of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) funding have been “unbelievably positive. When it comes to tunnel and bridge projects, when it comes to transit, when it comes to aviation and the ports of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, it has meant a huge amount of money. The $500 million for I-83 was the largest single grant award in the history of PennDOT for a single project.”
The money that the department spends on the state’s road and bridge network has been enhanced “in a significant way thanks to the IIJA program funds, and then these discretionary funds really mean a lot in a positive way for our state,” Carroll said. “Across the spectrum of modes, in every way, Pennsylvania and our partners have been huge beneficiaries of the IIJA.”
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PennDOT operates according to a 12-year plan — a trio of four-year segments of construction projects that are coordinated with project partners across the state. Maintenance, of course, is ongoing.
Carroll’s administration is hard at work overseeing a host of major projects in various stages of construction or design. Some of the most notable include:
- In mid-July of this year, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced a $500 million federal discretionary grant for the replacement of the I-83 bridge over the Susquehanna River. The I-83 John Harris Memorial (South) Bridge was built in 1960, widened in 1982, and connects downtown Harrisburg to its neighboring communities to the west in Cumberland County. The bridge currently carries more than 125,000 vehicles over the Susquehanna River every day. Still in the design stage, the project will cost about $1.2 billion.
- Another major undertaking, the Bayfront Parkway in Erie, will reconnect waterfront Erie with downtown and is now under construction. The goal of the project is to improve the pedestrian, bicycle, transit, and passenger vehicle connections between the Erie Central Business District and adjacent neighborhoods to the waterfront property north of the Bayfront Parkway. Preliminary construction work started in October of 2023. The project is expected to take several years to complete and will be done in stages that will maintain traffic to all the businesses off the parkway between the Sassafras Street Extension and Holland Street.
- A third project currently underway is the $328.9 million effort to replace and expand the existing covered section (I-95/CAP) of Interstate 95 at Penn's Landing along the riverfront in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood. The project has two main components: a new park at Penn's Landing and a new signature bridge at South Street, both of which will also extend over Columbus Boulevard to connect cyclists and pedestrians to the newly completed Delaware River Trail.
There is no shortage of work to be done. “We are unique in so far as the network that we have,” Carroll said. “We have 44,000 miles of roadway. Many of those are very small traffic on rural roads that in most other states are either municipal or county roads.”
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He added that Pennsylvania has more miles of highways to maintain than New York, New Jersey, and the New England states combined. “And so the challenge for our DOT is that we have to deal with I-90 in Erie and I-95 in Philadelphia, and we also have to deal with [the much smaller rural] roads that are in every corner of the state,” Carroll said.
When it comes to contending with labor shortages, the department makes an aggressive effort to recruit. This includes Shapiro’s no-college-degree policy for positions across the commonwealth. Safety remains a challenge.
“Safety is part of our culture,” Carroll said. “We are aggressive with safety stand-down meetings with county employees. The safety message needs to be embraced by people who wear hard hats and vests on the roadways. It’s an ongoing effort. It is also one of the reasons I wanted to meet with folks in various counties across our state, to make sure they know that I consider their safety to be primarily important as far as all the things we have to do. It’s critically important that we get folks back home at the end of their day without a stop at a hospital or an emergency room.”
