Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: This advice isn't worth the price
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
dan.casey
@roanoke.com
981-3423
Dan Casey
Recent columns
- There's a slip twixt cup, lip for Roanoke coffee shop owner
- 82 years of food fit for the King
- At work, on floor, in life: Rick Schmitt had all the right moves
Read Dan's blog
Remember the Pentagon's $1,800 toilet seat? Or the $600 hammer?
Both 1980s icons of government waste lodge in the mind's crevices nearly 30 years later.
Now we have evidence the sometimes ridiculous cost of government has climbed even higher.
Exhibit A is a story Monday by my colleague Laurence Hammack. It's about the $51 million renovation project for the Poff Federal Boondoggle -- I mean "Building" -- in downtown Roanoke.
The General Services Administration hired a consultant to recommend the best way to protect the Poff Building's strange, 30-foot-tall metal artwork -- oddly named "Force One: Consciousness is Crucial" -- during this big project.
The feds paid the consultant $7,246 for advice that you can boil down to two words: Move it.
Before you strain your noggin halving that sum and calculating the per-word cost, it's only fair to consider that the Oberlin, Ohio, expert had some expenses.
He had to travel to Roanoke, and spend a night here and eat.
Just for kicks, we'll assume he flew first-class, slumbered in the Hotel Roanoke's most luxurious suite, feasted on a 5-pound lobster and beluga caviar and washed it all down with a magnum of Dom Perignon.
Roughing it that way would cost about $3,000, according to my best guesstimate.
So, you see, the advice itself cost only $4,246, or $2,123 per word, a rate that's turned every writer in the Roanoke Valley green as an emerald with envy.
Perhaps when you consider the years of training that goes into art expertise, $4,246 for two words of advice isn't such a bad deal.
Roanoke sculptor John Wilson, with whom I am acquainted, told Hammack that the cost is not exorbitant. (They were speaking on the phone; we shall assume he said it with a straight face).
But what would you expect Wilson to say?
Those art guys stick together tighter than Masons.
Early in their careers, when they're starving, they pinky-swear a secret artists' oath.
Rule numero uno: "Never make fun of a brother's fee, no matter how outlandish it seems."
As for the recommendation, it's a no-brainer on par with opening an umbrella in a downpour.
"Force One" is barely 16 feet from the 14-story building's north face. I paced it off Monday.
The renovation involves erecting scaffolding to replace all of the exterior glass. The entire north face is glass.
Of course the statue should be moved.
Paying for such advice is like hiring a grocery store clerk to recommend you store a carton of ice cream in your freezer.
One of Mill Mountain Zoo's monkeys would give you the same answer in exchange for a banana.
Now, the art expert offered a nice deal as to storage.
That would be free, provided the federal government arranges the transportation to Oberlin, Ohio.
Considering the $2,123 per-word cost of "move it," that caveat is a frightening prospect.
Roanoke is 427 miles from Oberlin, or 854 miles round-trip.
At the reduced federal rate (I am making this up, just to be a smart ass) of $100 per mile (including insurance), that works out to only $85,400 for transportation -- for a statue the feds paid $58,000 for in 1976.
That still would be a pittance compared with $51 million in renovations on a 1975 building that cost less than $13 million to build.
It also leads to many questions about the larger project, which U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke County, has been properly raising for months.
Because if they're blowing $7,200 on a consultant for the most obvious advice possible, imagine all the other fascinating expenses the $51 million contract covers.
Like a whole bunch of $18,000 toilet seats.
Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
