Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Another success for the profiteers:
The longstanding debate over how much work the state should contract to private engineers is resurfacing in the wake of a state audit released Tuesday.

The audit (PDF) revealed that on 125 projects, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation hired private engineers even though cost estimates (PDF) completed between March 2007 and June 2008 indicated it would be cheaper to use in-house staff. WisDOT estimated it would cost $1.16 million more to hire private consultants than to use in-house staff for the projects.

The department is turning to private engineers more often because it does not have enough employees to do the work, said Mark Klipstein, president of the Wisconsin State Engineering Association, which represents engineers employed by government agencies.

The article goes on to say such wonderful things as that no one at WISDOT is even monitoring these private contractors enough to be sure what it is they're supposed to be doing.

But there's even more. This should make you feel better as you're traveling the state on your summer vacation:

The Legislative Audit Bureau created the report at the request of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee after indications Streu Construction Co., Two Rivers, was not paving thick enough concrete on WisDOT highways.

The audit did not find proof highways were not being built to specifications, but it found projects where contractors and WisDOT were not keeping enough records about pavement thickness tests.

The audit studied 20 WisDOT projects performed between 2006 and 2008 and found 11 of them did not have enough documentation proving contractors measured highways to confirm they were built to the correct thickness. The audit made a number of recommendations to WisDOT to improve its quality control and warned those improvements should be complete in time to affect work on projects receiving federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money.

1 comment:

  1. Capper, don't you understand that lack of oversight and accountability is the entire point of privitization?! ;)

    It's a feature, not a bug. Nothing to see here...move along.

    ReplyDelete