A friend of mine, lets call him the Chad, went on a rant today that I had to agree with him on, and pass on. He is a mechanic for a private garage that specializes in school bus repair and maintenance.
His rant was about how the school board, reacting to parental / taxpayer pressure, is forever second guessing any non scheduled work on the buses. These are units that run in rural Ohio right at the terminal morraine, so you get lots of brake abuse, tire wear, and damage to body panels. Add that to the damage that the precoat that ODOT uses does to any surface, and you will run into a job that starts out looking like it will be a 2-3 shop-hour job end up being 6-8 hour job.
One of the schools whose buses the Chad wrenches on spent $15,000 to have the football field resodded after it was ripped up from repeated games after heavy rains. This same school did not want to pay full freight to have the rust damage to a unit’s superstructure, which would have run around $5,000. Instead they sat on the bill until the shop’s owner cut them $1500 off of the bill, when his price was nearly $2000 below what the next cheapest competitior would be.
After he started on his rant I had to agree a football field is nice, but it does not have the potential to kill 60+ kids if it is not done correctly. This got me thinking, how many other things are the government screwing up on? Looking at appearances and perception as opposed to where the rubber meets the road (yeah, its a bad pun)
I know this is really getting into the General for a general post, but is it just here that folks do things this stupid at the local level, or is it everywhere?