Our Tax Dollars At Work

Scanning yesterday's local newspaper, this story jumped out at me. Not so much for the story itself, but for the underlying concepts involved.

The Texas Department of Transportation (known in these parts as TxDOT) plans to contract out minor, routine maintenance work on parts of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Dallas and on Interstate 45 from Dallas to Houston.

The move, officials say, could save the state $120 million over five years.

For years, TxDOT has hired private companies to do major road maintenance and rehabilitation projects. But agency officials decided to cast a wider net after saving money on a pilot project in Houston, in which a private contractor bid the work for $10 million less than what it would have cost TxDOT to complete.

That tells you everything you need to know about the private sector vs. government agencies.

Think about it. Private firms, which have the added burden of needing to turn a profit -- in contrast to government agencies, which don't even need to break even -- can still do the same job for substantially less.

“Right now, whenever you have tight budgets and everybody is in a budget-cutting type mode, we still have to maintain our product at the same level,” TxDOT spokeswoman Kelli Reyna said. “One of our goals is to always be innovative and look to ways to be more creative in generating revenue.”

WTF? Generate revenue? You clowns are supposed to build and maintain roads. You are most emphatically not a revenue generating agency.

TxDOT will put out a request for information to potential contractors and could issue contracts in the coming months if agency leadership determines this is the right move, Reyna said.

The agency will evaluate the success of the strategy before deciding if it's a long-term solution.

Seems pretty obvious to me. The more projects TxDOT shifts to private companies, the more money they save. What's the problem with that?

Oh yeah ... I should have known. (Note the party affiliation of this moonbat - as if there was any doubt.)

House Transportation Committee member Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, said Wednesday she doesn't oppose TxDOT privatizing more projects as long as the agency extends these new contract opportunities to underutilized, women- and minority-owned businesses.

“They need to make sure they are giving everybody an opportunity to bid for those projects and that they are able to participate,” she said.

So according to the dems, building and maintaining roads is not something to be done as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, but rather it's another government give-away program.

Oh my aching butt...