Well let's see if I can beat Boortz again. It's really no fair since I'm writing this on a Sunday night and he won't put sumpin' on his website until tomorrow morning, but he should be all over this article in Sunday's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.
The headline:
Millions wasted at MARTA
Pricey computers in storage will never be used
I'm shocked! Shocked I say. MARTA wasting money? How can that be?
Past two security doors, in a gray concrete building, a 20-by-20 room holds nearly 500 pieces of computer hardware the transit agency never expects to use. The equipment includes stacks of high-end modems, circuit boards and network routers, as well as a $1.26 million IBM mainframe mothballed three years after it came online.
Holy shit!
Public transportation hasn't done too well in Atlanta. MARTA (which some say is an acronym for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta) has been in financial trouble since its existence. The light rail trains are clean, and, since there is a line that runs to the airport, nice for that purpose. But, since rail is expensive, there is not enough of it.
And MARTA has had some bad publicity lately. A few years back, one of the members of the board was a lady who lived in public housing. Her qualifications? She rode MARTA. Lemme get this straight. We have someone who cannot run her own life as evidenced by the fact that she has to live in public housing, helping to run a multi-million dollar organization. No wonder MARTA has problems.
Many of the items remain in their original shipping containers, and most were never installed. Despite that, MARTA spent tens of thousands of dollars on maintenance contracts to make sure some of the unused equipment would run properly.
WTF? They're paying IBM for maintenance contracts on equipment that hasn't even been unpacked? Wait. It gets worse.
MARTA outfitted the storage room in 1999 to be a state-of-the-art computer center. But after spending $299,000 to equip and secure the building for computer operations, MARTA laid the plan aside, making the space perhaps Atlanta's most well-appointed storage closet.
Purchasing documents show the transit agency spent $2.4 million to renovate the space and to buy and maintain about 30 of the big-ticket items stored there. Officials say they don't know the total cost of the other items in the room.
Heads should roll over this.
The money would have come in handy in recent years as MARTA has eliminated more than 600 jobs and cut back bus and rail service to balance its books. The transit agency continues to face budget shortfalls and is looking for more than $1 billion over the next decade to expand train and bus service.
Yep! But what's MARTA gonna do about this?
General Manager Nathaniel P. Ford said new controls would prevent future errors in technology buying, but he does not intend to dig deeper to see who made purchasing mistakes in the past. "My frustration is that I'm spending time looking back and I've got to get this place rolling," he said.
He's not gonna try to find out who's responsible for this fuckup? What's wrong with this picture? As I said earlier, heads should roll over this.
MARTA officials blame some of those mistakes on continually shifting priorities and leadership in its Department of Information Technology, known in-house as IT. Dunna in April became the department's seventh manager in seven years.
Well, that could explain part of it.
In late 1998, records show, the transit agency spent $394,121 to upgrade its mainframe computer, even though officials had already ordered a new one to replace it. Then, in October 1999, MARTA stopped using the older computer, even though the upgrade had included a Y2K patch to ensure it would still function after Jan. 1, 2000.
Officials acknowledge MARTA continued to pay IBM for maintenance on the mainframe for more than two years after unplugging it. A 1998 invoice from IBM showed the maintenance cost $27,356 a year. MARTA discontinued the service in mid-2002.
Oh man! How would ya like to be the IBM marketing rep who has the MARTA account? These MARTA IT folks are a bunch of fucking idiots!
In the past, Ford said, MARTA executives often did not even understand IT spending. When IT asked permission to buy more equipment, he said, supervisors would say, " 'OK, here. Here you go. You need it. It's technical stuff. Nobody understands it any damned way when you guys are talking.' So it gets purchase-ordered and off people go and they buy
And the IBM marketing reps are fighting over the MARTA account.
In the print edition of the paper they had a nice summary:
The Mainframe
The sniffers
The center
MARTA also had a cellphone scandal a while back. They also spent a lot on a big Christmas party. Probably to celebrate all the money they have wasted.
Yep! Just what we need. A bigger MARTA so they can waste even more tax payer dollars. We have seen the future of mass transit in Atlanta and it does indeed suck.
Big time!