Charles Stricklin

Imagine you’re the mayor of a metropolitan area than, because of massive flooding, your city has approximately 50,000 abandoned, destroyed cars strewn all over the place. You’re on record as saying you’d like to get the city cleaned up and reoccupied as soon as possible.

Now imagine that a private company from a neighboring state offers to collect all those abandoned cars, pay your city $100 for each of them, and sell them for scrap, and they tell you they can finish the job in approximately three and a half months.

Do the math: 50,000 cars x $100 = $5 million dollars.

Would you accept the offer?

But wait! Before you answer, you think there may be legal concerns. “What about the owners of all those cars?” you ask yourself. “Do we have the right to, in effect, sell their cars?”

If you were to contact a city attorney, you’d find that there are already laws on the books that allow your city to contract with companies to remove abandoned cars and sell them for scrap metal.

Now, would you accept the offer?

New Orleans’ Mayor Ray “Chocolate” Nagin didn’t.

Without even asking for legal clarification, he turned down that exact offer, opting instead for a government program that would cost $23 million dollars and take an additional 2 to 3 months to complete.

In effect, he cost the City of New Orleans $28 million in direct and lost opportunity costs. And, since New Orleans is bankrupt, he has in reality, cost the taxpayers of Louisiana, of which I’m one, $28 million dollars.

Thanks, Ray.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.