Eyes on Milwaukee
Streetcar Project Receives Federal Grant
City will use funding to study extension of streetcar to Bronzeville and Walker's Point.
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City will use funding to study extension of streetcar to Bronzeville and Walker's Point. Back to the full article.
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Hurah!
$750k just to “study” it? Can we put any of those unused funds into actual construction?
Great news!
Sounds stupid to me
Casey, your comment is right on in my opinion. I would be interested in a breakdown of how you spend 3/4 of a million $$ to study something as straightforward as this. Anyone have any idea? Of course, “Government Money” (aka, Other Peoples’ Money) always seems different than “real money”.
But I try to envision how to translate something like this into terms all can comprehend. Like, for example, if a person pays $5,000 a year on property taxes, then It would take 150 of us to foot the bill for this study if we were to divert our 2017 property taxes to whomever is going to rake in that money “studying”. Or, if we have various people working on the study, each making $50 an hour, that’s 15,000 hours. 7-plus “person years”.
Having worked in private sector management, business ownership, and consulting, it seems to me that if this were a competitive situation, the project specs would probably say something like: “Final report due 8 months from start date; 2 expert professionals required, with 1 or 2 administrative (analyst type) personnel. Please specify hourly rates of pay for the necessary talent. If your budget for doing this project is more than $250,000 — do not bother to submit a proposal.”
Here’s the thing. Tell some organization(s) you’ve got $750,000 to spend and (guess what!!) it WILL all be billed, and probably half way through there will be a “change of scope” request for another $200k, because everyone just KNOWS that government will roll over and pay.
If this 100 million would have been used fro buses it would be valuable.