The bright side of Joyce's adventure in innovative transportation funding - besides his resignation last week - is that it helped force a host of Pennsylvania and New Jersey politicians, from the governors on down, to pretend they just realized the DRPA is a mess.
Sure, there were a few other glaring signs: the authority's ability to fund stadiums, museums, and other projects that have little to do with bridge-painting; a threatened 25 percent toll hike that was eventually postponed; and governance practices so opaque that even Philadelphia union boss John J. Dougherty realized something was amiss.
The rising calls for reform may be rooted, fittingly enough, in a patronage dispute between the DRPA's executive staff and Dougherty, a member of the agency's board. But the most potent symbol of this crisis is the E-ZPass transponder that Joyce unilaterally transferred from a fired secretary to his daughter.
Mind you, to oversee about 160 employees, Joyce was making almost as much as Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey gets to run a force of 6,600. The DRPA's own consultant figured Joyce deserved a pay cut of about $50,000.
He was so expensive that even his subordinates were costly by human standards: The DRPA chief of police, for example, makes $130,000 a year. And Joyce was moonlighting as a $67,000-a-year part-time solicitor for Pennsauken - presumably to make ends meet.
What could possibly motivate a man drawing more than a quarter of a million dollars in government compensation to take pains to spare one of his dependents from paying four bucks to cross a bridge? Only a deep-seated and probably pervasive belief that the DRPA exists primarily for the personal benefit of the political appointees who nominally manage it.
Not to worry: DRPA chairman John Estey says officials have been busy "professionalizing" the agency in recent years - a frightening prospect given the recent revelations. What was the agency doing before it was professionalized? And is professionalism really a concept that's being introduced to an agency that operates four bridges and a rail line?
Here's a guiding principle for all of the politicians now joining the professionalization process: The DRPA simply doesn't need and isn't suited to a bloated staff of failed politicians pursuing an expansive mission of pork and patronage propagation. Let's limit it to running a railroad and a few bridges. It's a humble task, but it's serious enough to occupy what should be a small government agency.
