Beaufort County government is the Center of the Universe of Bad Judgment | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears courtesy of the Beaufort Observer.

    The Beaufort County Board of County Commissioners has managed recently to eclipse a long list of bad decisions. If there were a Nobel Prize for Bad Judgment, Beaufort County Commissioners would have won it each year for the last ten years. Six commissioners, at the May 7th meeting, managed to top the 1.6 million dollars for architect's plans for a jail before they knew how they were going to finance it, located the US Highway 17 bypass at a place that has no value to Beaufort County or the City of Washington, overspent a 33 million dollar school bond issue by 8 million dollars, tried to take over the VOA site with an agreement that said we could never own it but were required to pay for all maintenance and up keep, paid several times the appraised value for land, etc, etc. More recently, they shirked their oversight duty of the Sheriff's budget which resulted in abuse of county property, are spending thousands of dollars defending a law suit that could easily have been settled by simply agreeing to adhere to the law...I could go on and on.

    For those of us who understand earning interest on money, or who are financial types, or who just have commons sense, get this: The county will borrow 4.4 million dollars to automate water meter reading by radio from transmitters located on your property with receivers on water tanks. Here is the kicker, we will only save $200,000 per year in the cost of reading meters by reducing cutting two jobs and with other supposed savings the total comes to $200,000. What is the return on investment from this expenditure of 4.4 million dollars, plus interest? Or, how long will it take us to break even? The answer is 22 years.

    From a money management standpoint this is one of the dumbest ideas out there. Look at what the opportunity costs will be. Where could we put that money and get a better return on it. Even if we kept the money in the bank or did nothing we would be ahead. Long term federal bonds are paying 3.25 percent per year. That comes to $143,000. Now, the "savings" are reduced to $57,000.

    When investing public funds in enterprise (government businesses) projects like this we should get a minimum 10 percent return on investment or a ten-year payback. Usually, getting a 3 to 5 year payback is a no brainer.

    Simply put, there is no way we will ever get our money out of this. It is a dead expense. That means those who use county water are going to be hit with rate increases.

    I tried to talk about "pay back," or Return on Investment when this item came up. I am sorry to say that not a single commissioner understood "payback." I bet those of you who are in the business world know what it is. These guys think "pay back" is what they try to do to me when I catch them red handed doing something really dumb.

    There are a lot of unanswered questions about this system which uses radio signals sent to local relay stations mounted on water tanks and then to the "central command" located in the water department. We've all heard in recent months about hacking of networks. But there was little concern about how secure this network would be. What will prevent the network from being abused? Does this information ever get on the internet? If so, it could be hacked by someone in China or Russia or Nigeria. Without getting too technical, just imagine that they are talking about installing a microphone and camera on your private property. No, the county's equipment would not do that but are we going to be able to keep Bad Guys from hacking into it to do whatever they wish? Our other six commissioners were not concerned about network security.

    The company that is making money on this is the one who is "consulting" to the county and selling us the goods. Sounds a lot like the consultant we hired who managed to write the specifications on the 911 communications system so his favorite company became the single bidder for 1.8 million dollars while his competitors could to do the job for as little as 1.23 million had the specs been competitive . This was a system that we really did not need anyway. More bad judgment from these commissioners.

    If there is no profit in it for the Water Fund, why do we need to spend this money?