Government Waste: An example close to home

The easiest and simplest answer to the question of why government programs are wasteful and inefficient, and often corrupt, is to observe that people take care of their own stuff better than they do someone else’s stuff. (Has anyone ever washed a rental car?) Examples close to home that I have witnessed over the last several years involve various construction projects at Encanto Park. The most recent one is remodeling the rest rooms. This is a project that should take a private owner a couple of weeks at the most. But this remodeling at Encanto Park has been under construction for several months. During a recent walk through the Park I stopped to ask the private contractor foreman about this and, not surprisingly, he said that the reason for the many delays is the micromanagement of the Park employees and the number of changes they frequently make in the plans. This foreman confessed that these delays were so embarrassing to him that he was thinking of taking down his company’s sign on the project to preserve his reputation.

Another example at Encanto Park is the fencing that was recently put up around perimeter. This took over two years and was a job that should have taken a month at the most. Again, a lack of proper incentives is the reason. No Park employees lose their jobs over such delays and I am sure that some event get rewarded for coming up with clever ideas of changes that need to be made while construction is underway. The taxpayers have to foot the bill for these changes. This kind of behavior is what produced the famous saying “There is no end to amount of good you can do when you are spending someone else’s money.” Maybe it is time to privatize park management.