Posted on: Thursday, February 27, 2003

EDITORIAL
Too pooped to patch: $156,000 is wasted

You may have done this yourself. You splurge — really spend too much — for some gadget that may have sounded too good to be true in the showroom.

When you get it home, there's a series of unpleasant surprises: You can't figure out how to operate it at first, so you bend it or scrape it a little bit. Plus it doesn't run on the wattage you have, or it's the wrong size, or it needs parts or ingredients that you can't get.

You realize the gadget will never be any use to you, but you're too embarrassed to take it back — just imagine the look the salesman will give you when you try to explain the ignorance and bad judgment that led you to buy it.

So it goes on a shelf or in the back of the carport or under the house, where you hope you'll never see it again.

It's still there. No, not your $10 cockroach zapper or your $50 duck rotisserie. We're referring to the state's $156,000, state-of-the-art Rosco RA-300 pothole patcher.

On paper, reports Advertiser staff writer Jim Dooley, this gadget should definitely have saved the state — and the taxpayers — lots of time and money. The truck-mounted machine should have reduced the needed crew while putting down a more resilient layer of asphalt.

But state personnel didn't know how to clean it properly, so it got gummed up. Plus there was no way to load asphalt and oil into its respective top-loading tanks because the state doesn't have overhead dispensers. And, finally, the machine requires a special kind of asphalt mix that isn't available on O'ahu.

So the truck has been parked — don't say abandoned — in the Highways Division base yard since it was brand new, in July 2001. It's never patched a pothole, and it's been such an embarrassment that no one prevented vandals from having their way with it.

When this kind of misjudgment happens to you, it's perhaps an expensive learning experience. It's your money, after all.

When it happens to the state Department of Transportation, it's a waste of 156,000 taxpayer dollars — the kind of thing that, through frequent repetition, has given government bureaucracy a bad name.