Sixty-seven full-time job vacancies at the Iowa Department of Transportation will not be filled in the coming year, but DOT officials are asking the governor and legislators to set aside $6.2 million to cover pay increases as well as higher insurance costs for employees who are still on the payroll.

“We’re smaller than we’ve ever been,” says Mark Lowe, who takes over as interim director of the DOT tomorrow. “We are a third smaller than we were in 1997. We are almost 30 percent smaller than we were in 2009 and 20 percent smaller than we were in 2010 and so we’ve really made that trajectory to smaller government aggressively.”

Read the full article on the Radio Iowa website.