Budget Watch Nevada

This is starting to sound like a broken record (or scratched CD for the under-40 crowd).

It was reported in the L.V. R-J today that the Clark County School District’s original budget projection for a new computer system overhaul was $33 million back in 2004. That sounds like an awful lot of money to me already, but now, the District is saying that the system will actually cost $40-50 million. Unbelievable.

Of course when there is no accountability, and when you just tap the taxpayers for more money to feed your misspending morasses, it’s not a problem. In the real world/private sector, heads would roll and the project would probably be scrapped outright.

If CCSD were broken up into smaller parts, as right-minded realists have been demanding for a decade or more, each small district could keep track of its information and databases with $50,000 worth of software and servers, and probably operate using only QuickBooks, MS Access, and MS Excel.

When you are a large monopoly that moves at glacial speeds, you always want the latest and most expensive system, recommended by the vendors who took you to the finest restaurants in town — cost be damned. And by the time it’s implemented, they’ll want another $10 million to pay for updates.

As if we needed any other proof that CCSD should be deconsolidated, this is it. How many textbooks, condoms, free lunches, and math teacher bonuses could we get for our $50,000,000?