Ridiculous: East Link wants kudos for being on budget?

Apparently, we’re spending too much time focused on the $225 million cost-overruns on the I-90 project. If only we focused on projects that are meeting budget expectations! That’s a takeaway from an interview with Ron Lewis, Executive Director for East Link Light Rail. That’s a preposterous position.

Related: Is Sound Transit bad at math or just dishonest?

“Out of the seven major construction contracts at the end of the day, yes the I-90 is over what we anticipated… all of the others are below or at the budgets that were established…” explained Lewis on the latest edition of Ross Files with KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross.

When Ross noted that Lewis wished the mainstream media would cover that part of the story too, you could actually hear Lewis’ excitement at the opportunity to complain that “no one approached me with a microphone…” after he came out with projects under budget in the past.

While I can appreciate the desire for some positive reinforcement, this is the equivalent of asking the boss for kudos every time you show up to work on time. Part of your job is to deliver projects on-budget. It’s why you create budgets in the first place; they’re not supposed to be a mathematical exercise in futility. When you’re on-budget, you’ve done your job and you should not be approached with mics unless your position is that government projects are so poorly handled that you’re the exception.

And with respect to being under budget, we’ll all happily take the savings, but it can be an indication that your original budget wasn’t properly planned. If we’ve set aside a significant portion of dollars for a project that you’re under budget on, it means those dollars were sitting there, unused, when they could have gone to actual use on other projects.

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