For years, a California Department of Transportation executive, Jeanie Ward-Waller, said she asked tough questions about multimillion-dollar road projects at meetings where she was often the only woman.
Male bosses criticized her for being too emotional or aggressive, she saidin interviews with The Times over the last two weeks. But Ward-Waller swallowed it, seeing it as part of her job to push forward an agency undergoing seismic shifts.
This summer, as the deputy director of planning and modal programs, Ward-Waller began raising questions about a $280 million repaving project along a stretch of Interstate 80. Ward-Waller became increasingly concerned the project was surreptitiously widening 3 miles of the freeway — at the same time top state officials were pledging to end traffic-inducing freeway expansions to help meet ambitious climate goals.
Advertisement
Under state law, such projects require environmental review and public airing, but this plan had none of it, she said — and it tapped funds set aside for maintenance. It happened to be along the same 20-mile corridor of I-80 from West Sacramento through Davis where a partially federal funded freeway lane is being proposed.
The funding for that corridor was competitive to get, and Caltrans could lose it if the project was not done quickly, she said.
She suspected the repavement project was intended to jump-start the corridor work by adding space for a new lane while bypassing the environmental analysis normally...
Australia visa fraud: Vaneet Kaur Chadha, who once told Indian visa applicants to "stay truthful and avoid future complications," has now been struck off as a migration agent in Australia for doin...