Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development
government agency in Louisiana
The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) is a state government organization in the United States, in charge of maintaining public transportation, roadways, bridges, canals, select levees, floodplain management, port facilities, commercial vehicles, and aviation which includes 69 airports, in the U.S. state of Louisiana. The agency has approximately five thousand personnel on staff and an operating budget of $2.3 billion. DOTD operations are run through nine district offices across the state.
The current DOTD Secretary is Joe Donahue, appointed in January 2024 by Governor Jeff Landry. Other functions of the DOTD are Dams (Dam Safety Program), flood control (Floodplain Management, water resource management (wells), and maintaining state-run ferries and moveable bridge status. The Louisiana Transportation Authority (LTA) is also under the DOTD, as well as the DOTD port construction and development.
History
The new Louisiana Constitution of 1976 (adopted in 1974) and Act 83 of 1977 abolished the Departments of Highways and Public Works and restructured them into the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD), thereby encompassing related activities such as highways, public works, aviation, public transportation, and a number of transportation authorities, committees, boards, and commissions. This form of organization continued until 1988 when Act 488 placed all agency functions under one of three offices: the Office of the Secretary, the Office of Engineering, and the Office of Management and Finance.
Act 71 of 1998 reorganized DOTD into its present functional arrangement of the Office of the Secretary and five other offices.
DOTD district offices
The DOTD has 9 district offices across the state.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development” as government agency in Louisiana. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as government agency in Louisiana. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2400783. The Library of Congress control number is n80135722. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 1976, 1974 and 1977.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.