Garrett Eucalitto (above at left), commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation and 2024-2025 president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, explained why he made “Centering Safety” the cornerstone of his AASHTO presidency during a visit to the organization’s office in Washington, D.C., on May 2.
[Above photo by AASHTO]
In town for the four-day AASHTO Executive Institute or AEI conference for state department of transportation executives, Eucalitto said that while he’s always been passionate about safety, the death of CTDOT employee Andrew DiDomenico, 26, killed in June 2024 by an impaired driver while collecting litter ahead of mowing operations on the Wharton Brook Connector in Wallingford, CT, convinced him to make safety the centerpiece of his one-year term as AASHTO’s president.
“It was devastating,” he explained during a conversation with AASHTO staff. “I went to the scene. I then had to go inform his mother and father. It brought me immediately back to a focus on safety. It changed everything for me.”
Not only did that reconfirm to Eucalitto why he needed to make “Centering Safety” the focus of his emphasis areas, it also guided him in breaking that safety-focus down into three specific areas:
- Safer Communities: Understanding community values, engaging residents, and determining which safety improvements work in specific situations in each community by implementing “Complete Streets” policies and deploying proven safety countermeasures that will help create safer communities.
- Safer Users: States continue to invest in efforts to combat and address unsafe driver behavior, yet the nation has seen an increase in speeding, impairment, distractions, and other reckless behaviors since 2020. Centering Safety means using infrastructure treatments, speed management, advanced technology, enhanced enforcement, better data collection and analysis, and more effective education to improve safety.
- Safer Workers: State DOT employees, transportation workers, and emergency responders, are facing increased risks and disregard for “Slow Down, Move Over” laws due to speed, recklessness, impairment, and distraction. Centering Safety for the nation’s transportation workers means providing more and better safety equipment, increased efforts to train response teams in traffic incident management, and more widely available mental health resources.
Alongside his safety focus, Eucalitto is also concentrating on the upcoming reauthorization of federal surface transportation funding legislation, due to occur in 2026 when current funding encapsulated within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or IIJA of 2021 is set to expire.
[Editor’s note: An article in the fall 2024 issue of the AASHTO Magazine provided an in-depth look at Eucalitto’s emphasis areas for his as well as the interesting career path he travelled to become CTDIT commissioner.]
“Reauthorization impacts everything we do, including safety,” he said. “I talk about reauthorization all the time as we need to ensure how we can successfully maintain the current funding level. That’s why telling the story of why this level of investment in transportation is critical. We need to make sure this [funding debate] means something to the end user. We need to show how [transportation funding] improves their quality of life.”
Getting the average American to understand impact of transportation investments is not an easy task, Eucalitto admitted, but one he believes AASHTO is well positioned to address as it is a national organization.
“We need to tell our story everywhere, about why authorization is important, but that can be hard to do as a state DOT individually as each of us is limited by our [state] boundaries,” he pointed out.
“AASHTO has that national vision – and we [state DOTs] need to be able to lean on AASHTO staff to help establish that vision,” Eucalitto added. “I come from an old mill town, up in the rural hills, so my town will not have the same [transportation] needs as Wyoming will, or major urban center like New York City. That’s really why we need to get out into our communities and talk to our residents about what is going on.”
That “boots on the ground” mindset is also why Eucalitto undertook a long-term effort to visit every CTDOT facility statewide when he became the agency’s commissioner in January 2023.
“We are a small state with 3,300 employees spread out across 80 buildings,” he said. “Early on, I realized needed to go visit them – to the garages where the snowplows are, where our construction crews are based. I made it a priority not to be tied to my desk, even though I love to dig into transportation policy memos. [Those visits] turned out to be the best part of my week.”
Eucalitto said he asks the CTDOT employees he visits with at each facility two questions: What is your favorite thing about CTDOT and what can I do to make things better for you?
“I take down what they ask from me and then I either fix it or I come back and tell them why I can’t fix it – as well as what other options there might be,” he noted. “I recognize that they will be there doing those jobs far longer than me in the commissioner’s role. So it’s important I make sure they have best tools and working environment possible to do their jobs.”
