Mon County Area Roads and Infrastructure (Parkersburg, Wheeling: purchases, retired, requirements)
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Here’s the full DOH Audit FYI. It appears that NO district has been using the full allotment with most being in the 50% range. So the previously mentioned assumption that some districts were getting their full allotment plus some of what was left over from other districts appears to have been inaccurate.
That's an awfully lot of information to try to sort out. While I recognize that road maintenance is complicated and somewhat unpredictable (you never know where the rock slide will happen), I would have thought that most of the maintenance divisions would have been fairly close to the plan estimates most of the time, but it looks like there is very little work being done that comes close to the plan.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CTMountaineer
Thanks for posting that. While ostensibly the entire state is under maintained, as you pointed out, those tables illustrate glaring disparities in expenditures with our district regularly being short changed, and Mon County in particular getting the short end of the stick. There are 70% allocations for some districts, and 40% for others, notably ours. Also, note that the $300 million actually spent exceeds allocations, which gives rise to ask … how is it that more is spent in total than allocated while the county figures show percentages less than 100%. Something seems fishy there.
It isn't rocket science. They need to arrive at a fair formula that considers both the number of miles to be maintained and the amount of traffic on those roads, and legislate it into the permanent budget instead of leaving the decisions up to political hack bureaucrats.
Which page shows Mon County being short changed? Those numbers are a % of the allocation being spent as planned, not a % of something paid or not paid to the district.
If there is something wrong with the formula, correct the formula and send it to the legislature and all the news media so they will have to fix it. BTW,, what IS wrong with the funding formula? I hear people from all over the state complaining about road maintenance. (Heck, I've seen it myself.) Maybe it's not funding, but work execution that's the problem.
Maybe it's not funding, but work execution that's the problem.
Ding ding ding.
In most of the conversations I read about the roads I hear the same excuse, that it's just so wet here. It's mountainous! It's hilly! It has winter. It has water!
I recently traveled back to my home in North Georgia. In the actual mountains mind you. They average 62 inches of rain. Morgantown averages 44 inches. The snow average is less in N GA but the ice level is higher than in Morgantown. It is much more hilly, mountainous, curvy, and so on.
And yet the roads are night and day. Complete night and day. The biggest difference seems to be that in N. GA they actually build the roads to support water runoff, and they build curbs into the sides of roads to prevent the crumbling at the edges and fall off.
Similarly where I lived in Montana gets much more extreme freeze and warm cycles than does here and the roads there are 100 times better than here. Montana will see 10 degrees before sunup and 10 inches of snow, that melt during the day due to solar radiation, turning everything to water and 60 degrees and then drop back to 0 at night. Talk about freeze cycles, they happen hourly.
Yet the roads? Great. Yes there are potholes but they are planned for and corrected.
It's not the rain. It's not the terrain. It's more along the lines of poor execution, failure to hold the contractors to a standard, with probably a little bit of work longetivity mixed in: If we build them poorly they'll always pay us to fix them again.
There is nothing unique about this area that should cause the roads to be as poor as they are. It's either incompetence or willful neglect.
I can't explain why they put telephone poles in the middle of sidewalks, however. That seems to just be ignorance.
In most of the conversations I read about the roads I hear the same excuse, that it's just so wet here. It's mountainous! It's hilly! It has winter. It has water!
I recently traveled back to my home in North Georgia. In the actual mountains mind you. They average 62 inches of rain. Morgantown averages 44 inches. The snow average is less in N GA but the ice level is higher than in Morgantown. It is much more hilly, mountainous, curvy, and so on.
And yet the roads are night and day. Complete night and day. The biggest difference seems to be that in N. GA they actually build the roads to support water runoff, and they build curbs into the sides of roads to prevent the crumbling at the edges and fall off.
Similarly where I lived in Montana gets much more extreme freeze and warm cycles than does here and the roads there are 100 times better than here. Montana will see 10 degrees before sunup and 10 inches of snow, that melt during the day due to solar radiation, turning everything to water and 60 degrees and then drop back to 0 at night. Talk about freeze cycles, they happen hourly.
Yet the roads? Great. Yes there are potholes but they are planned for and corrected.
It's not the rain. It's not the terrain. It's more along the lines of poor execution, failure to hold the contractors to a standard, with probably a little bit of work longetivity mixed in: If we build them poorly they'll always pay us to fix them again.
There is nothing unique about this area that should cause the roads to be as poor as they are. It's either incompetence or willful neglect.
I can't explain why they put telephone poles in the middle of sidewalks, however. That seems to just be ignorance.
Well, now we have it. Everything will be under control soon since the Governor has placed his former mine boss, Byrd White in charge of the DoH. Byrd's considerable mine management experience makes him imminently qualified to lead a highway department. The remaining question is will Jesco be placed in charge of District 4?
I think we can all take solace in the fact that the administration has chosen to take 25 year bonds to pay for routine maintenance that has been totally neglected for as long as 38 years locally. We'll be paying for a quarter century for temporary fixes that will last 5 or 10 years. I just know all those Wall Street bankers on staff down there in Charleston are shaking their heads over this one.
That's an awfully lot of information to try to sort out. While I recognize that road maintenance is complicated and somewhat unpredictable (you never know where the rock slide will happen), I would have thought that most of the maintenance divisions would have been fairly close to the plan estimates most of the time, but it looks like there is very little work being done that comes close to the plan.
Which page shows Mon County being short changed? Those numbers are a % of the allocation being spent as planned, not a % of something paid or not paid to the district.
If there is something wrong with the formula, correct the formula and send it to the legislature and all the news media so they will have to fix it. BTW,, what IS wrong with the funding formula? I hear people from all over the state complaining about road maintenance. (Heck, I've seen it myself.) Maybe it's not funding, but work execution that's the problem.
You said it yourself … spent as planned. Pages 14 and 19 answer your question. Our district consistently has had the least amount of money spent as planned, and figures show that actual expenditures exceed what was allocated or planned in the state. They spent more money than allocated or planned in the state, but none of that excess was spent in our district. When pressed for an answer by our local county commissions, they were told that they are unable to compete for workers in our region because their pay scale is too low. It costs more to hire drivers in our area because oil and gas companies pay twice the DoH wage scale for CDL drivers, and they have been using that as an excuse to simply not get the work done up here. The money has been diverted for unplanned fixes in the southern areas, which money is reflected in the 300 million figures on the graph that are well above the allocated amounts.
Instead of doing what they do in other jurisdictions, which is provide location pay supplements to hire workers for higher wage areas, they simply let the problem fester and use it as an excuse to covertly divert funding to their preferred locations. Since the actual expenditures do not show up in the planned or allocated budget items, they have been able to do this with impunity until post audit questioning brought about the answers.
You said it yourself … spent as planned. Pages 14 and 19 answer your question. Our district consistently has had the least amount of money spent as planned, and figures show that actual expenditures exceed what was allocated or planned in the state. They spent more money than allocated or planned in the state, but none of that excess was spent in our district. When pressed for an answer by our local county commissions, they were told that they are unable to compete for workers in our region because their pay scale is too low. It costs more to hire drivers in our area because oil and gas companies pay twice the DoH wage scale for CDL drivers, and they have been using that as an excuse to simply not get the work done up here. The money has been diverted for unplanned fixes in the southern areas, which money is reflected in the 300 million figures on the graph that are well above the allocated amounts.
Instead of doing what they do in other jurisdictions, which is provide location pay supplements to hire workers for higher wage areas, they simply let the problem fester and use it as an excuse to covertly divert funding to their preferred locations. Since the actual expenditures do not show up in the planned or allocated budget items, they have been able to do this with impunity until post audit questioning brought about the answers.
No. You said Mon County was short changed. Failing to spend their allocation as planned (just as most of the other districts did) is not being short changed. If they are being short changed, the audit should show something that looks radically different for District 4 and/or Mod County. I didn't see that.
No. You said Mon County was short changed. Failing to spend their allocation as planned (just as most of the other districts did) is not being short changed. If they are being short changed, the audit should show something that looks radically different for District 4 and/or Mod County. I didn't see that.
You have to read between the lines to see how it is happening. One of those graphs indicates that around $300 million was actually spent in the state on maintenance, while only 200 something was allocated and planned. While all districts only had a certain percentage of the planned money spent as planned (and our district was pretty consistently the one with the lowest planned amount spent), the planned/allocated money, all of it, was in fact spent. In fact, a figure much larger than the allocated money was spent. It just was not spent as planned. It was spent mostly in southern projects that were not formally planned or allocated. The fact that bureaucrats had the discretion to do that is the root of the problem.
That 50+% of the "planned" allocation that was not spent in Mon County is not still sitting there ready to be spent. It was not spent as planned here. That is true. It was, however, spent. Elsewhere.
You have to read between the lines to see how it is happening. One of those graphs indicates that around $300 million was actually spent in the state on maintenance, while only 200 something was allocated and planned. While all districts only had a certain percentage of the planned money spent as planned (and our district was pretty consistently the one with the lowest planned amount spent), the planned/allocated money, all of it, was in fact spent. In fact, a figure much larger than the allocated money was spent. It just was not spent as planned. It was spent mostly in southern projects that were not formally planned or allocated. The fact that bureaucrats had the discretion to do that is the root of the problem.
That 50+% of the "planned" allocation that was not spent in Mon County is not still sitting there ready to be spent. It was not spent as planned here. That is true. It was, however, spent. Elsewhere.
There's no need to read between the lines when the footnotes and the report itself fill in the blanks. To repost part of my second post: The percentages listed in the tables are the percentages of the total budget for each district that were used on core maintenance. Core and non-core maintenance activities are defined in Appendix D beginning on page 40. The goal was for each district to use 70% of its budget on core maintenance. This is why those at 70% or above were highlighted in green because they met the goal. At the bottom of each table, it clearly states that Core percentages are reported on the table. The residual (non-core) percentages are not reported for table formatting interest. Residual percentages are spent on non-core maintenance activities within the maintenance organization of interest. Core and non-core percentages add up to 100%.
In other words, ALL of the money allocated for District 4 was spent in District 4. NONE of it was moved to anywhere else in WV. District 4 just spent around 50% of its allocation on Non-Core maintenance rather than 30% or less, which was the goal. The figures that you speak of were $260 million that was allocated and $300 million was the actual total expenditure. The table on page 38 shows you what was allocated for each district and what was actually spent. Not surprisingly, the extra money was spent in EVERY District. District 4 was usually $3-4 million OVER their allocation each year and as high as almost $6 million in 2013. Starting on Page 31, there is an explanation as the why the goal of 70% spent on Core Maintenance was not met.
So in conclusion, EVERY District got to spend all of the money allocated to that District plus more that was not originally allocated. The assertion that anything otherwise happened is just plain false. No one got cheated.
There's no need to read between the lines when the footnotes and the report itself fill in the blanks. To repost part of my second post: The percentages listed in the tables are the percentages of the total budget for each district that were used on core maintenance. Core and non-core maintenance activities are defined in Appendix D beginning on page 40. The goal was for each district to use 70% of its budget on core maintenance. This is why those at 70% or above were highlighted in green because they met the goal. At the bottom of each table, it clearly states that Core percentages are reported on the table. The residual (non-core) percentages are not reported for table formatting interest. Residual percentages are spent on non-core maintenance activities within the maintenance organization of interest. Core and non-core percentages add up to 100%.
In other words, ALL of the money allocated for District 4 was spent in District 4. NONE of it was moved to anywhere else in WV. District 4 just spent around 50% of its allocation on Non-Core maintenance rather than 30% or less, which was the goal. The figures that you speak of were $260 million that was allocated and $300 million was the actual total expenditure. The table on page 38 shows you what was allocated for each district and what was actually spent. Not surprisingly, the extra money was spent in EVERY District. District 4 was usually $3-4 million OVER their allocation each year and as high as almost $6 million in 2013. Starting on Page 31, there is an explanation as the why the goal of 70% spent on Core Maintenance was not met.
So in conclusion, EVERY District got to spend all of the money allocated to that District plus more that was not originally allocated. The assertion that anything otherwise happened is just plain false. No one got cheated.
Tim, take the time to actually read page 31. There you will see their explanation as to why District 4 did not receive the supposedly intended expenditures. In it, you clearly see that their primary excuse was a labor shortage here. District 4 is only 1/2 staffed compared with other districts in the state. They go on to correctly explain that the oil and gas employment situation makes their salaries non competitive, while at the same time putting greatly added burden on the roadways due to the extra heavy truck traffic. They use excuses instead of providing the obvious solution, which it to pay the market rate for workers locally with a location bonus. It costs more to hire truck drivers here than elsewhere in the state. That is not our fault. It is just the market situation. It is their responsibility to find a way to deal with that and still get the services done here.
Tim, take the time to actually read page 31. There you will see their explanation as to why District 4 did not receive the supposedly intended expenditures. In it, you clearly see that their primary excuse was a labor shortage here. District 4 is only 1/2 staffed compared with other districts in the state. They go on to correctly explain that the oil and gas employment situation makes their salaries non competitive, while at the same time putting greatly added burden on the roadways due to the extra heavy truck traffic. They use excuses instead of providing the obvious solution, which it to pay the market rate for workers locally with a location bonus. It costs more to hire truck drivers here than elsewhere in the state. That is not our fault. It is just the market situation. It is their responsibility to find a way to deal with that and still get the services done here.
No, those are reasons as to why they didn’t meet the goal of spending 70% of allocated funds on Core Maintenance. It clearly states that. The table on page 38 also clearly states that District 4 spent more money than they were allocated every year. Pretty simple.
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