$75,000
I happened to be thumbing through the state Senate’s Transportation Budget today. Given my lack of policy depth in this category and my admitted lack of insight into how transportation dollars flow, my general tendency is to defer to members of the transportation committees in both the House and Senate.
But one tiny, inconsequential but symbolic line item drew my attention and caused me to roll my eyes: $75,000 (presumably through a personal services contract) for the Washington State Department of Transportation to secure short term consulting support to create a pilot program of organizing, managing and developing advertising for their website.
We spend $1.9 billion for equipment, software, infrastructure and nearly 6,000 state employees to manage our state’s technology resources.
Our lack of enterprise wide thinking is crushing us. And draining our pockets. Surely there is someone in the institutional infrastructure of state government with expertise, interest and depth in the area of web-based advertising who has some time to help our friends at Wash DOT figure this out.
$75,000 isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, of course, despite being about double the annual salary of a legislator.
Your partner in service,
Reuven.
