Good stewards of Public money?

Today was day two of "Budget Slashing in the News" and it got me to thinking about how good we (state employees) have been with the public dollar. It's our dollar too but I'll grant that the majority is from non state employees, the private sector.

It will be easier to start backwards, with the current state agency that I work for. The legislators are proposing cutting the Basic Health plan because it will save $33 million. The sad thing is, we spent around $50 million on a project to replace the eligibility system and never finished the project. I'm not saying we failed, we were told that there wasn't enough money to complete the project. OUCH!

Did the system need replaced?

No, it was fine and is still in place today. Here's what happened. The executive management would tell the legislature that we could complete any of their requests because the system (PAY1) was too old and inflexible. Every response was, "The system was built 30 years ago and all the developers died 10 years ago.". OK, I made up the part about the developers. The system is alive and well and is one of the most stable systems in Washington State because it is a mainframe system. Big Iron old Blue IBM ASCII kicking day in and day out!

Here's where management went wrong. I'll say management because it was not the Information Technology (IT) folks that perpetuated the lie. The economy was strong and state agencies, the Health Care Authority included, was pissing through money like it was a 30 pack of Busch beer. They bought new everything, new overhead projectors, new flat screen TVs, new software, new, new, and more new everything.

Each time a request would come in, it was exaggerated and justified by adding "the system is 30 years old and guarded by evil trolls", or something like that.

I was asked to give estimates for legislative request and always given the "wink wink" which was code for, price it out of this world. It was fun to give an actual and honest estimate just to see the reaction from management. Thinking back on it, this could have been where I fell from grace. If I thought it would take 40 hours, 40 hours was my estimate. I would not budge and turn the estimate into 400 hours.

This post has caused me to answer my own question. No, we have not been good stewards of the public's money. That's my honest answer.

Take a minute to visit Old iSkool and The Goal Farm too!
I am sticking with this hands-free data-entry device and still would like someone to volunteer to edit this blog. I'm doing the best I can but it's hard to catch my mistakes and all the times the software doesn't understand me.