Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Classic Government Case
A story in the morning Journal Sentinel regarding a State of
The project began several years ago with an estimated cost of not quite $13 million. It will officially “end” on June 30th of this year with an estimated total cost of some $110 million dollars, a cost overrun of something on the magnitude of 850%. And, the project is not really going to be finished on June 30th, it is just being officially ended so that the numbers quit cycling upward. The project supposedly will go on for another several months but, since that cost will come from other budgeted items, it seems there is no further cost involved from the government’s perspective.
The project head has advised that a thing that bites almost every IT project, “scope creep”, is at the bottom of this huge cost overrun. He claims that the addition of three agencies and their servers to the project after it started account for the overrun. That sounds suspicious on its face since the three couldn’t possibly have been large enough to have accounted for an 850% overrun.
The real clincher is this: the state has no idea if this project will end up saving money through the consolidation of the 1,000 or more servers involved. All they really know is that the new server array is supposed to cost about $18 million each year to operate; no one tracked the individual servers’ costs before so a calculation of true savings is impossible.
This is just one area of state spending that has been examined closely. Is it likely that we’d find other areas of waste if we really looked closely at every aspect of government in
Lean government wouldn’t waste as many of our dollars as a fat government does because there’d be fewer dollars put into its kitty to begin with. Even if the same percentage of waste occurred, 10% of $1,000 is a lot less than 10% of $10,000.
As we permit our large government bodies to grow, we permit the waste inherent in each to grow. It is much easier to identify areas of concern at the local community level. It becomes more difficult at the county level, and overwhelming at the state level and beyond.
Is it time to shrink our state government and re-focus more services at the county and local level…if those services are indeed required to begin with?
This site uses Facebook comments to make it easier for you to contribute. If you see a comment you would like to flag for spam or abuse, click the "x" in the upper right of it. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use.