Finally someone has stood up to DOT officials, calling them out for painfully slow work on the N.C. 24 widening project through Clinton, and urging them to see it through without further unnecessary delays.

We cannot thank Mayor Lew Starling enough for standing up for citizens and for speaking up on their behalf. Not only did he get state DOT officials — and at least one Board of Transportation member — to respond to his pleas to deliver some kind of explanation on the lack of progress, he had them do it at a public meeting.

Starling, always a champion of doing things in the open rather than behind closed doors, is to be applauded for taking all those to task who tried to zig and zag their way through those explanations at Tuesday’s City Council meeting without taking true responsibility for the extensive delays since the contract was let five years ago.

At one point the mayor said: “This one-mile stretch of 24 is our main corridor … where some of our churches, our community college, our shopping centers, our businesses are. We’re just trying to understand. We are getting so many complaints about 24 it is unreal.”

He is right. Complaints pour in at every turn from people who are frustrated by the maddening delays and the lack of work that has been going on along Sunset Avenue. Who can blame them? Over and over the timeline has changed, with dates pushed back months at a time, with pretty poor excuses as to why the delays have been necessary. (Hurricane Florence would have been a good reason if work had actually been going on before the storm hit!)

Barrels have become permanent fixtures along that portion of the roadway, raised manhole covers have turned the one-mile stretch into an obstacle course and a lack of reflectors due to roadwork has made visibility at night and during stormy weather nearly impossible. Travel is impeded yet few, if any workers have been visible until the last few weeks.

Of course, DOT officials question the assessment of work that has been undertaken on Sunset over the past few months, saying though perhaps not apparent, there was work going on.

And our own state senator, Brent Jackson, though chagrined by what he called “the nightmare,” the road work has caused, ended his brief remarks at the Council meeting this week by saying “…we (the state) have done a lot the last few years in transportation.”

Really? Work has been steady? A lot has been done? Just ask those who travel that one-mile stretch of road two, three, four times a day how much work they’ve witnessed. Ask them, too, if they think the DOT has done a lot, as Jackson asserted.

We don’t believe citizens who travel that road would feel the same way DOT and other state officials holed up in Raleigh do.

And while you’re at it, ask anyone in Clinton if they think Starling’s move to get DOT officials to explain the delays in an open meeting is about some sort of political advantage, as Mike Alford, a member of the State Board of Transportation, asserted.

Alford obviously doesn’t know Starling, nor his tenacity when it comes to seeing that the city and its citizens aren’t taken advantage of by anyone.

While Alford would have preferred to sit down behind closed doors with DOT officials and Starling, that’s not the mayor’s way of doing the public’s business. He prefers to do it in the open, where citizens can hear firsthand what is going on, and we applaud that at every turn.

That is what transparency in government is truly about, and when it comes to what is really going on — and not going on — on N.C. 24 through Clinton, citizens can stand a whole lot of transparency.

And they can use an advocate like Starling willing to get all the people involved with the N.C. 24 project in one room with the public and hash it out.

Given that work on the road has certainly increased three-fold since the mayor first called DOT to task a few weeks back, it certainly looks like airing the issues in public has made a difference.

And for that we, and residents should thank our mayor.