The Senate unanimously approved overhauls and budget cuts at the state Department of Transportation on Friday, sending a bill with long-term implications to the House for more debate.

The measure gives the DOT's appointed board more oversight authority after a year where the department overspent by more than $700 million. It also reworks the board itself, taking half a dozen appointments from the governor and giving them to General Assembly leadership.

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The measure reworks the department's budget, too, finding cuts across a range of programs. Some of the deepest cuts will hit the department's public transportation, bicycle lane and pedestrian accounts.

They'd shrink by more than 80 percent each.

"This bill is really, really bad," said Kym Hunter, an attorney and lobbyist for the Southern Environmental Law Center who was concerned not just about the cuts but the power shifts.

Bill negotiators stressed these are one-year cuts and said they hope to increase these line items as the department's stretched budget recovers.

"I want everybody within the sound of my voice to understand that these cuts were not made ... without deep thought," Sen. Tom McInnis, R-Richmond, said Friday. "We're going to look at every line item in the next budget year."

The bill won a pair of unanimous votes this week from senators who said something had to be done.

The DOT got a scathing audit earlier this year. Its budget took a quadruple whammy over the last several years:

  • Leaders spent more money faster to speed up projects
    • Massive storm clean up costs after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence
      • A high-priced loss in a court case on rights-of-way payouts
        • Gasoline tax revenues plummeted when people stopped driving during the coronavirus pandemic.

          Many projects have stopped. Outside engineering firms have cut staff. The department's 9,300 employees face furloughs.

          “We had to make very, very hard choices," said Sen. Mike Woodard, D-Durham.

          "No one agency or individual has received all that they asked for in this package," McInnis said. "This is truly a compromise bill."

          Senators changed the bill's board appointments section Friday to remove a requirement that at least three of the governor's appointees come from a political party other than his own. He would get 14 appointments, and General Assembly leaders six under the bill, and the full board would have 20 members.

          The governor gets all 19 board appointments on the current board.

          With the change to the bill's partisan requirement Friday, Woodard said he believes Cooper will allow the bill to become law.

          The DOT has been reformed over the last decade or so to give the board less power to pick highway construction and maintenance projects, a reform effort meant to take politics out of road-building decisions in the state.

          Hunter said House Bill 77 leaves the new board with "a lot more power on what’s going to get built ultimately." Woodard said the board needs more financial oversight, but that lawmakers aren't undoing reforms they passed in 2013.