There Are Times When Government Does Matter

Extraordinary economic times demand innovative thinking on the part of leaders in state government. Theirs is a difficult task: maximizing tax dollars while simultaneously trying to keep a multi-billion dollar budget in balance.

It’s a task that demands new solutions to old problems, but with those new solutions sometimes, new problems materialize.

Take, for example, two examples from the news in recent days and months: Virginia’s $2 billion contract with a private defense contractor to provide information technology support to all government agencies and the Virginia Department of Transportation’s contracting of private companies to clear snow from the state’s highways.

There are many things the private sector does better and more efficiently than government, however, the delivery of key public services is not one. And, in our opinion, the computer backbone of the entire state government and snow removal from major highways count as “key public services.”

The saga of Northrop Grumann and its contract with the Virginia Information Technology Agency has been well documented in recent months by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Missed deadlines, over-charging for basic computer services, sloppy service, network outages that have crippled key state agencies.

And the company still says it’s doing a fine job, thank you very much.

More recently, it was the blizzard that struck Virginia one week before Christmas that exposed VDOT’s over-reliance on private contractors to assist in snow removal. One of the horror stories emerging from the storm was that of hundreds of people being trapped in the snow on a stretch of Interstate 81 near Christiansburg and in Rockbridge County.

According to The Roanoke Times, Infrastructure Corp. of America (ICA), a company based in Brentwood, Tenn., has a $28 million contract to keep interstate highways in the Roanoke and New River valleys clear during all seasons. The company also has a similar contract for the northern portion of the interstate in the Staunton Transportation District.

Did the company do its job that snowy weekend in December? Obviously not. And VDOT officials and government leaders want to know why. What’s even more troubling is that, on at least one prior occasion the Roanoke paper reported, the state has docked the company’s pay for not living up to the terms of its contract, awarded only in 2007.

That’s when VDOT embarked on a major push to contract out as much maintenance work as possible to private sector companies, under pressure from the General Assembly, especially the anti-tax wing of the Republican majority in the House of Delegates.

Did ICA skimp on snow removal in an effort to save money, i.e., to increase its profits on the state contract? Who knows? But a review of the matter by VDOT is in order.

The I-81 snow disaster has also garnered the attention of two legislators from the Roanoke Valley: Republican Del. Dave Nutter and Democratic Del. Jim Shuler.

Nutter, from Christiansburg, rather predictably issued a call for VDOT to explain the I-81 failing. GOP delegates, you see, try blame the victim in situations like this; they’ve cut the department to the bone, looking for “waste, fraud and abuse” to pay for needed transportation work, so obviously, to them at least, it’s VDOT’s fault the private firm was not up to the task.

Shuler, of Blacksburg, is the delegate asking the proper questions in this matter: Is state government relying too much on the private sector to provide key government services?

“It was felt that private industry could do it better and cheaper than a state agency,” Shuler said in an interview with The Roanoke Times. “I think we’ve come to realize, with this latest disaster on a major snowstorm, that private industry didn’t step up to the plate like it was anticipated.”

Sadly, it wasn’t the first time ... either for this specific company or the private sector in general.

And this matter just underscores again, as if any more proof were needed, that government is needed and that it does play a key role in our daily lives. We citizens need to realize that; we need to realize also that the services we expect of government are not free, much less obtainable “on the cheap.”

In other words, you get what you pay for.

And in these cases, tax-hating legislators and the Virginians who keep electing them to office certainly did.