A Clerk-Typist’s Path To the Top of ARDOT

Lorie Tudor, director of the Arkansas Department of Transportation (Jason Burt)

Lorie Tudor’s last day as director of the Arkansas Department of Transportation will be Jan. 10 and will mark the end of a true Arkansas success story.

Tudor, 64, made a bit of history when she became the first woman named director of the department in 2020. Her story is more remarkable than that.

Tudor started at ARDOT in 1981 as a clerk typist, just another unsung, rank-and-file, entry-level employee. Even from those beginnings, Tudor knew that there was more she wanted to do and more that she was capable of.

After more than a decade at ARDOT, Tudor left the department to attend the University of Memphis, from which she earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. She returned to ARDOT as an engineer in 1998 and methodically worked her way up the ladder before being named director in 2020.

Tudor said that if someone had told her all those years ago how successful her career would be, she wouldn’t have believed them. She joked she was just a young mother struggling to get to work on time because she didn’t know what she was doing.

“Well, it’s been a great journey,” Tudor said. “I’ve had a wonderful career. I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

“I was driven to want to succeed, and I succeeded far beyond my wildest expectations. The commission giving me the chance to be director was a chance of a lifetime. It’s been the highlight of my career.”

Tudor did not have an easy start to her tenure as director. The COVID-19 pandemic struck the country shortly after her appointment, and the next year, a potentially catastrophic crack was discovered in a critical support beam on the Hernando de Soto Bridge over the Mississippi River in Memphis.

The Interstate 40 bridge was shut down for three months for repairs, snarling traffic in the Memphis region. Tudor said her goals after the news broke of the crisis were simple: own the failure, be transparent about what ARDOT was doing to fix the problem and regain the public trust.

“When it was happening, we didn’t really know anything else to do,” Tudor said. “It was like, ‘This is really bad, and what else can we do other than just explain what we’re going to do to fix it?’ To me, that was the only path forward.”

Tudor has many other proud moments from her time as director. She said the opening of the I-40 Bella Vista Bypass in 2021 and the completion of the I-30 Crossing project in Little Rock were huge successes.

“The big projects are proud moments, but so are the little projects,” Tudor said. “The little projects mean the world to a small community. Those are as important to me as the big projects. There’s just a lot of satisfaction knowing that what we do at ARDOT makes life better for everyone across the state.”

As her final day approaches, Tudor gets emotional thinking of how many people have thanked her for her work in promoting work safety and better pay for the rank-and-file employees.

“I’m just an emotional mess,” Tudor said. “Something that they say that just makes me so proud is that they all feel like I cared so deeply about the employees and I’ve done a lot to make their jobs safer and to try to get their salaries better. That has been a huge goal of mine since I became director.

“In my own small way I did make a difference to make life better for our great employees at ARDOT.”

Tudor said she doesn’t know what she will do in retirement but she plans to be active. She would like to learn another language or two, learn more about information technology and the Bible, and even learn some new cooking skills.

“I know I’m not ready for the rocking chair, but I’ll find something to do,” Tudor said. “Hopefully, it is something meaningful and fulfilling. I will have a great retirement doing something I really love; I’m just not sure what that is yet.”