If Gov. Cuomo learns the lesson of his great highway-sign debacle, it’ll be worth all the millions the taxpayers wasted on it.
The latest bad news came from state Transportation Commissioner Matthew Driscoll in legislative testimony last week: It turns out the signs, meant to promote tourism across the state, cost $6.3 million more than the original $1.76 million estimate.
For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a 358 percent cost overrun.
It seems the Department of Transportation paid $5.4 million for 374 signs, while the Thruway Authority spent $2.7 million for another 140.
All for advertisements that have to come down, because the Federal Highway Administration says they’re too distracting to drivers.
The original idea seemed nice enough: New York state is full of tourist attractions — historic sites, great natural beauty, cool cultural venues and so on. Why not promote as many as possible with signs on nearby highways?
The feds screamed as soon as they heard about it, but the gov persevered — and none of his aides could talk him out of it. Indeed, Cuomo was so dead-set on getting signs up before last year’s July 4 holiday, he told transportation workers to “do whatever it takes” — at the expense of the state, which had to pay overtime.
And, oops, the signs had to be made out of state in order to get the job done.
“It’s just a disregard for the taxpayer, as usual, that we see coming out of Albany, you know, where money — as if it grows on trees — we can just spend it to do all sorts of things,” Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-SI) told CBS News.
Transportation Commissioner Driscoll, a team player if ever there was one, gamely defended the indefensible. “That $1.7 million [cost estimate] was [at] a point in time,” he said. “Now that we have all the costs in we know that it’s $5.4 million” for the DOT. “That’s our all-in cost.”
All-in — until the signs are all down, anyway. Then again, he also says the state is still trying to get the feds to agree to leave them up. To be fair, no deaths so far have been traced to the signs. Heck, maybe the Trump administration won’t care about highway safety…
Memo to the governor: Hire someone who can talk you out of these things before it becomes an embarrassment, or worse.
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