US construction for transit projects is very expensive and involves a lot of extra pork subsidies for the numerous hands who will show up to participate.
That pork can metastasize. In Los Angeles Richard Riordan was mayor when construction started on the Red Line Subway project. Bechtel was, I believe, the prime contractor. Soon the horde of alphabet soup construction supervision companies arrived. Their function appeared to be to sell $100.00/hour expertise to MetroRail for $200.00 per hour, or more.
When, after almost two decades of neglect and the transition of Los Angeles voter demographics to "majority minority" status, Los Angeles Unified School District finally managed to get a $2.3billion bond issue passed, Riordan, who later unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican, exacted a price from the District for his support of the bond issue: the District had to hire out the construction supervision.
Riordan knew just where they could find such help--these same companies, ex Bechtel, arrived. Then they metastasized again, with additional layers for Design Management. Now they are consuming tens of millions of dollars of bond money every year, about 40% of the total budget.
One of the chief excuses for the existence of a District so large as LAUSD was that they had in house expertise in the design and construction of schools. They had an Architecture and Engineering Branch that would supervise the preparation of drawings for new or reconstruction projects. They had departments with project managers and inspectors. Many projects were done entirely in house. The preparation of drawings for the renovation of over 250 school, the first two years of contracts, was supervised by one engineer and a handful of assistants. Four years later each of Regions A-K had offices with more consulting technical personnel than had been available to that engineer, they were doing a worse job and costing vastly more.
Riordan liked to talk of "Public-Private Partnerships." That is what led me to observe that "a public-private partnership was primarily a means of putting public money into private pockets." If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
Can you perhaps tell me what made New Jersey's River LINE so incredibly expensive? (In that case, it's not 40% but at least 80% of the budget which is totally unjustified and looks for an explanation.) *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
