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Jimmy Wriston is out at Department of Transportation, points toward accomplishments

Jimmy Wriston, West Virginia’s transportation secretary for the past few years, is no longer in that role.

“My status as of 12:01 Sunday night was I have left the office of secretary of transportation,” Wriston said on a Tuesday evening telephone call.

Jimmy Wriston

Wriston was appointed by then-Gov. Jim Justice as acting director of the Department of Highways in 2019 and as secretary of transportation in 2021.

Justice completed his two year term, and Republican Patrick Morrisey was sworn in as governor on Monday.

Wriston stood out for his white beard and his signature look of draping a tie over his shoulders — but he brought 25 years of experience with the state Department of Transportation at the time of his appointment.

He began his career at the state transportation department in September 1996, working for the bridge department for District 9 in Lewisburg. He moved to the engineering division in 2004 as a project manager before becoming a regional engineer in 2005. For the next 12 years, Wriston served as the agency’s chief transportation engineer and special program manager.

In the Tuesday evening phone call, he described his most recent role as the toughest job you’ll ever love.

He described pride in encouraging personnel, maintaining roads in West Virginia’s tough weather and terrain and expanding the highways system through projects like the Roads to Prosperity.

“The overview is, we accomplished a lot of work. But more importantly, we changed the culture inside the division and the department,” Wriston said. “We really focused on the health of the organization, and we recognized and defined the organization as the people in it.

“We really set out to try to take care of those folks, those hardworking civil servants out there that are serving the public every day — mainly the ones you’ve seen during the snowstorms and things.”

He said the agency strived toward data-driven decision making processes.

“We assess the conditions of our assets and then take that data, turn it into information and decide how we can best apply resources to move things forward. We did that with every aspect, every operation, every procedure we did. That was a herculean effort to really turn things around in the department.

“We had some policies in highways that hadn’t been looked at or reviewed in 25 years. We literally sat down and went through all of them. We revised and rewrote almost all of our policies and matched them up with the practices and how we do things.”

He ranked Roads to Prosperity, which was a funding framework for priority roadwork across the state, as among the highest accomplishments.

“We delivered the Roads to Prosperity program. That will be wrapping up and all of those bond buckets will be spent down to zero this year. We delivered those projects; they’re almost all done,” he said.

And, he said, “We’ve done more maintenance work in the last five years than we have in the history of the department. We’ve done it efficiently. And it’s real easy to think we just threw a bunch of money at things, and that’s not what happened. What we did is we actually had enough resources to accomplish some things.”





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