{"id":13946,"date":"2010-10-01T12:55:28","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T17:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=13946"},"modified":"2014-10-02T10:19:47","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T15:19:47","slug":"13946","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=13946","title":{"rendered":"The Dayton Dustbowl: Those Pesky Contractors Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember when we first looked at the Dayton Dustbowl, back on Labor Day?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We looked at all the holes in the original Dayton Dustbowl – the 1.0 version of Mark Dayton’s budget plan.<\/p>\n

One bit that got carried through verbatim in Dust Bowl 2.0 was this plan – to save $425 million per biennium by halving the number of contractors<\/a> employed by the state.<\/p>\n

Has it really only been a month?<\/p>\n

At any rate, Catherine Richter of MPR’s “Poligraph” reports<\/a> on what SITD readers have known for a month, now; that this just isn’t going to work:<\/p>\n

Dayton’s correct that the state spends approximately $850 million per biennium on outsourcing. And cutting such activity in half could save the state more than $400 million.<\/p>\n

But in practice, Dayton’s plan appears difficult to implement. Many of the state’s contracts provide essential services that the state would still have to supply one way or another.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I had forgotten about this next bit, here (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

Further, Minnesota law requires <\/strong>departments and agencies prove no state workers<\/strong> can take on these tasks before they contract<\/strong> with a firm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Minnesota contractors already <\/em>provide services that are either legally mandated, completely unavailable on the state workforce, or both; bridge engineers, business analysts, concrete workers, surveyors, usability engineers, prison doctors and the hundreds or thousands of other jobs that state doesn’t need at all, until they absolutely, positively do.<\/p>\n

If the state gets rid of “half” of the contractors – who are already doing jobs that the state needs, but does not <\/em>have in the workforce – then in most cases someone’<\/em>s gotta do it.<\/p>\n

And that “someone” is going to be union labor, in all its exquisite expense, and racking up all those hideously expensive defined-benefit pensions that are going to eat this state alive about the time our kids start paying taxes.<\/p>\n

The way I see it, that’s a $425,000,000 hole per biennium blown in the Dayton 2.0 budget. \u00a0Tack that onto the $890,000,000 shortfall it already <\/em>has – by the Dayton campaign’s own admission! – and the Son Of Dayton Dustbowl is actually $1.315 billion short<\/em> of solving the deficit.<\/p>\n

The conservative alt media has called another one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember when we first looked at the Dayton Dustbowl, back on Labor Day? We looked at all the holes in the original Dayton Dustbowl – the 1.0 version of Mark Dayton’s budget plan. One bit that got carried through verbatim in Dust Bowl 2.0 was this plan – to save $425 million per biennium by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-13946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dayton-dustbowl","tag-mngov-2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13946"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13948,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13946\/revisions\/13948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}