ProJo sports columnist Bill Reynolds seems to be the coiner of the phrase "A Full Rhode Island," as a reference for the state's prototypical boondoggles. Well, if on average, we experience an AFRI every couple of weeks -- and sometimes much more frequently -- what's happening now is completely off the charts (although, as Bill would no doubt note, there is no apparent Bruce Sundlun connection). So this must be dubbed a Mega-Full Rhode Island:
-- The state budget is in disarray
-- The governor wants to ax 1000 state workers, and the unions want to ax him.
-- The hapless RI GOP can't get out of first gear.
-- The gov and the legislature continually point fingers at each other, yet neither has previously succeeded in rooting out the excessive expenditures being made by the state Department of Transportation, which as Kathy Gregg and Mike Stanton report today, faces a preliminary review from the RI State Police. Although the governor previously threatened to sic the state police on the Senate Government Oversight Committee, there's clearly plenty to look at:
Responding to a public-information request filed a month ago, the DOT earlier this week acknowledged paying “overhead” rates that add anywhere from 65.94 percent to 210 percent to the bills it has been paying private companies for their staff engineers, draftsmen, technicians and typists.
With pay levels averaging $84.73 an hour (including the guaranteed overhead and profit payments), the state, for example, is paying one consulting company — in the middle of the pack — the equivalent of $176,238 a year for each of the engineers and technicians doing wind and traffic studies on a Pawtucket bridge.
One of the highest overhead rates, 201 percent, goes to Plangraphics, a Frankfurt, Ky., company that billed the state for what is broadly described in DOT records as a “plan library archival numbering system.”
Adding insult to injury, the state has been paying big bucks for a meager return:
Among the key findings: with more than 600 bridges across the state to keep in safe condition for travel, the Rhode Island DOT’s structural-design program “is currently less effective than the structural design programs in most other state highway agencies.”
Despite 780 employees and a $338.8-million state and federally financed budget, the agency does not have one “expert” in hydraulic and geotechnical engineering on staff, “which is essential for the oversight of safe and cost-effective foundation and wall design. … The RIDOT relies on consultants for these services and has no expertise or systematic program in place to measure the adequacy or efficiency” of their recommendations.
Such disclosures do nothing to improve the dim view that many Rhode Islanders have of state government. Citizens should be watching to see if the state can move past partisan warfare to get a handle on this stuff.
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