It’s not a good week for the City of Houston. Matt Stiles at the Chronicle had a post I missed yesterday about all the lost water meters in the city of Houston. For years I’ve been hearing this number is “about 12,000.” No one ever said “exactly 12,xxx,” and now the Department is telling the Houston Chronicle that it will cost about $750 if they want that number.

The department said it would take 24 hours (and 55 minutes, no less) of programming and cost $755.31 to prepare the list. No wonder these things are lost!

Ok, I’ll take that piece of crap answer at face value and ask another question: Why doesn’t the city know this number already? Was there no time in the last four years that twenty-four hours and fifty-five minutes couldn’t be squeezed out to create this report? How much revenue is being lost because of this?

Given that the city has supposedly hired a contractor to do the job for it, I wonder what the bid process was like?

“We’d like you to find about 12,000 meters.”
“About 12,000?”
“Yes, roughly.”
“Could you be more exact?”
“Not really.”
“Okaaaaaaaay then. I’ll bid about a million dollars to do it.”
“WHAT? About a million??”
“Yes, roughly.”

I suddenly begin to see why some people at PW&E are starting to look a little green around the gills. I’m sensing some backsliding here, and an unwillingness to face up to the ugly reality staring the department in the face: these meters are “lost” because of years of understaffing and neglect.

Last year, I wrote:

Worse, it’s perfectly obvious that no one wants to know much about the misses, like why they happen, what kind of calls they were, or anything else about them for that matter. That’s a tactic that looks VERY familar to me, since I spent nearly 15 years under a management that engaged in it constantly. If you don’t have the information, you can honestly answer that you don’t have it. (The Assistant Director that told me that is no longer with the city. Thankfully.) The other half of the trick is to define your categories of information that you do keep in such a way as to be meaningless. Essentially, the numbers give a false picture because they’re measuring the wrong thing. Then bad budget and policy decisions get made with the wrong numbers, which means that even more “re-tooling” is necessary to keep the numbers looking good, and the next thing you know, you’re facing a disaster. My department is a multi-year recovery from that, driven in part by Mayor White’s performance initiatives, and partly by the changes in managment after the Great Retirement Slaughter of 2004. And some of the bad decisions made won’t be recovered from at all because they were capital expenditures and now we’re stuck with the results of such a poor decision-making process.

You should read that article, you really should. It makes it completely unnecessary for me to address this piece of absurdity–I’ve already said it all.