Lars Larson: ODOT has no $$ for snow plows? (lie)

By Lars Larson,
NW and national radio host,

Call me crazy, and plenty do, but plowing snow is “Transportation 101”.

Especially in a state where many highways get snow EVERY winter.

Feckless ODOT claims it lacks the cash to fire up the plows.

It demands Governor Kotek come up with 19 million bucks or the snowflakes stay on the highways.

Let’s test that extortionate notion.

3 plus billion dollars a year goes to ODOT.

That’s 8.3 million a day. An agency that hasn’t started a new freeway in 50 years, can’t get a simple bridge across the Columbia, and now can’t plow the roads without another one-third of one
percent increase?

Among its more than 45-hundred well-paid employees, ODOT has 70 full-time people who do nothing but manage money.

Out here in the real world, people who run short of cash must sort out the “nice to have” stuff from the “have to have” things like rent, gas and groceries.

I rank plowing snow as a “have to have”.

Yet out of 3 billion a year, ODOT’s financial wizards can’t find 19 million.

It’s the math equivalent of a guy making 300-thousand a year who tells his friends he’s walking these days ‘cause he doesn’t have 300 bucks to fix his car.

I’d call that guy an idiot.