Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Problems not difficult to calculate

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 15:04:15 -0500

Local News: Thursday, January 23, 2003

Nicole Brodeur / Times staff columnist
Problems not difficult to calculate

When questioned about the $34 million in
overspending that has forced the Seattle
School District to consider selling properties to
make ends meet, district bean counters said they had double-counted students
by mistake, and hired too many substitutes.

When asked why it needed a $27.8 million "bridge loan" to finish Marion Oliver
McCaw Hall, Seattle Center masterminds said they counted on more help than
they got from the state and King County.

When asked how much it would cost to extend light rail to Seattle-Tacoma
International Airport, as they recently announced, Sound Transit officials said
they didn't know.

And when asked why they didn't account for the $30 million it will cost to
replace the Public Safety Building with a public plaza, planners for the new City
Hall campus just shrugged.

What we have here is a failure to calculate.

So I went to Office Depot the other morning, convinced that if the bean counters
and planners who are running budgets into the ground had better office supplies,
maybe they could see where they have done taxpayers so, so wrong.

"That would be the Casio," sales whiz Ian McDougall told me as we stood
before a wall of calculators. "Goes up to 12 digits, so you can do up to the
billions."

He stepped up to one of the keypads, let it rip, then waved at the strip of blue
zeroes.

"That's about 100 billion," he said. "That's a good budget. That's what my
student loan looks like."

McDougall, 23, just graduated from the University of Washington and is headed
back to school to get a master's degree in education. He'll stay in school after
that, too: He wants to be a teacher.

But not in Washington state.

"The budget and the teachers' salaries ... ," he said, shaking his head. "I'm
going to go to California or overseas."

McDougall understood why I was there: Doesn't anybody downtown know how
to add and subtract? Can't they tell when we're in the red and maybe send up a
flare before there's a city-wide run on smelling salts?

"It's not like a calculator is brain surgery to use," McDougall said. "All you have
to do is plug it in.

"Of course, we all know now that's hard for some people."

I had a live one here, folks.

If you work in government, McDougall recommends a 12-digit calculator with a
printer. It's got your tax-and-exchange function, prints 3.5 lines per second,
sports an independent memory and a right shift for quick correction. Forty bucks
and you're out the door.

"They're foolproof," he said. "You can print up what you've done so when you
misplace that zero (emphasis his), you can check your work."

This place was full of ways to save taxpayers a little scratch.

Cheapest 12-digit calculator: $15.

"Accounting for Dummies": $17.99.

Mahjongg software? "They probably already have that," McDougall said. "That's
why you're here."

Respect of taxpayers: Priceless.

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