You buy a car and you know it’s going to come out one of three ways: a good deal, a fair deal, or a raw deal.
Mostly you want to avoid a raw deal.
In real life, any deal, purchase, or contract you enter into is considered with some sense of self-protection and due diligence.
But often this is not the case with government.
Deals are entered into that make no sense.
There are several reasons:
Incompetence. Cronyism. Someone’s palm getting greased. (It’s seldom an outright bribe but usually a quid pro quo. The sad thing here is that some hack eventually gets a job for $75,000 a year and as a result the state loses millions.)
But the biggest reason government makes bad deals is that people in government don’t think of public money like they think of their own. The protective instincts aren’t there.
In the long catalogue of bad deals by the state, Gov. Jodi Rell’s recent deal on our highway rest stops has to be a “Boneheads ‘R’ Us” award winner.
Project Service LLC — a partnership between Connecticut-based Subway sandwich shops and Washington, D.C.-based Carlyle Group — is going to spend $178 million over five years, and then an additional $52 million, to renovate 20 rest stops in Connecticut.
In return, the state will give up millions of dollars received under its rest stop contract with ExxonMobil. The state now gets 11 cents for every gallon of gas sold at one of these rest stops. Under the new deal, the state will get a penny.
It gets better.
The guv wrote the contract for 35 years. Not only do we get a raw deal, and get it good, we get it for a generation.
Finally, in their wisdom, the leaders of our state government agreed that the state will be responsible for the environmental cleanup of the rest stops, always a big-ticket item.
Now these are the same people who say this is a good deal, because this way the state will not have to rebuild the rest stops itself, and borrow the money, with interest, to do so. They are just trying to save money, don’t you know.
(The assumption there is that it really does take $230 million to fix up 20 rest stops. Maybe the folks from TV’s “Home Improvement” are being hired to make each one really special.)
If you are trying to save on money and liability, would you volunteer to do the cleanup? Who would agree to such a thing?
There are five things wrong with this deal:
• The money.
• The length of the contract.
• The cleanup.
• The logic.
• The Carlyle Group — famous for-profit political fixers. (You read their name; you think, “Oh, really.”)
The deal is the product of a lame-duck governor who works within an exclusive circle of two to five people and apparently never bothered to consult legislators or anyone else with any wisdom or expertise.
Once again, state government is amateur hour and the citizens of the state take a bath.
On top of all this, you wonder if this was really a problem that needed fixing. Are the rest stops so bad? What are we really looking for, aesthetically, in a rest stop?
Your tax dollars at work, folks.
Maybe wiser legislators can find a way to undo this travesty.
Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
