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Beshear's Transportation Team

Beshear's Transportation team includes former watchdog FRANKFORT -- Gov. Steve Beshear, who has pledged to clean up the scandal-plagued Transportation Cabinet, today brought back somebody who lost his job while trying to do that a few years ago. Bobby Russell, a Richmond lawyer, was named general counsel for the cabinet by new Transportation Secretary Joe Prather.

As Frankfort observers may remember, Russell was the first-ever inspector general of the Transportation Cabinet until then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher fired him in 2004. The Fletcher administration did not publicly explain why it gave Russell the boot. But his firing came shortly after he turned in an extensive investigative report that angered the state's politically powerful road contractors, including Leonard Lawson, a major Fletcher supporter.

In his report, Russell said that road contractors were pocketing additional millions of dollars from their state highway deals through questionable "change orders" that added work but received little scrutiny. Despite requests to release Russell's report, the Fletcher administration sat on it for months.

Fletcher replaced Russell with a retired U.S. Secret Service agent, David Ray, although Ray, like Russell, soon found himself on the outs with the Fletcher administration. His chief deputy was improperly fired for political reasons by cabinet leaders -- the Personnel Board later ordered the man rehired -- and after the state hiring scandal broke in the Transportation Cabinet and various cabinet officials were indicted, the Fletcher administration began to bypass Ray's office altogether.

Prather also named two other cabinet officials today: Gilbert Newman will be the state highway engineer, one of the top posts overseeing road projects. Newman previously served as state highway engineer from 1988 to 1991. Most recently, Newman was regional manager and vice president for the Cincinnati office of ENTRAN, a Lexington-based transportation contractor working on -- among other projects -- the cabinet's Kennedy Interchange redesign in Louisville.

Chuck Wolfe will be executive director of the office of public affairs, making him the public voice of the cabinet. Wolfe was a longtime Frankfort bureau reporter for the Associated Press until he joined state government in 2004. Most recently, he was a spokesman at the Environmental and Public Protection Cabinet in the Fletcher administration. -- John Cheves PolWatchers


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