5 ms·

Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do k

Kind of weird to use a picture of the East Side Access project in New York as the lede. New York is a whole different case from the rest of the country. We do know why infrastructure in New York is so absurdly expensive. Outright theft and fraud is a big culprit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... > The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there. > “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” > The discovery... occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public This sort of behavior is unfortunately commonplace.

the_duke 7y ago
Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Infrastructure projects are always a prime danger for corruption. (large sums of money with customers that aren't under financial pressures like a company, actual or effective cost-plus contracts, chance for politicians to get "lobbied" and make lasting connections, ...) I think it's the same everywhere in the world, with varying degrees of dubiousness.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Corruption in New York is a whole different animal than any other state. New York has, hands down, the most corrupt state government in the country.[0] As just one example, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, openly orchestrated an illegal[1] coup to ensure that Republicans maintained control of the state senate, despite losing control in the then-recent elections. He did this because it ensured that he had unilateral power to decide which laws were even brought to a vote in the state legislature, so he could essentially pre-veto any legislation behind closed doors, instead of having to veto a potentially popular piece of legislation openly after the legislature passed it. Or, on the topic of public transit, Cuomo stole $5 million from the MTA (public transit for NYC metro area) and gave it to upstate ski resorts that he has a personal interest in[2]. [0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york-became-most-corrupt-state-in-america-117652 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york... [1] A judge later ruled that the caucus was illegally formed and ordered them to return the money, though I don't know if they ever actually did. [2] https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php
  - User23 7y ago
    Can confirm. New York crookedness is so advanced I can’t help having a grudging admiration. It’s been like that longer than any of us have been alive too.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?
    - chimeracoder 7y ago
      > I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat? Blagojevich is an amateur. He got caught. The ones who are the best at corruption are the ones who can keep it up for years - decades - successfully.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.
      - ameister14 7y ago
        >Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep. Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Local government in Chicago is designed to make corruption as efficient as possible. The alderman are like mini dictators.
jdc0589 7y ago
get out
ComputerGuru 7y ago
Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future. I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in New York state government. New Yorkers unfortunately can't do anything about it, because a combination of state laws have ceded electoral power to a handful of local pay-to-play clubs[0] which determine which candidates are permitted to run (unopposed) in elections. [0] Each district is controlled by a local club; membership in these starts around $1000/year, and these clubs are responsible for deciding when a local candidate receives a primary challenge. If the clubs don't approve a challenge, then the primary election is cancelled.
  - twunde 7y ago
    1) I don't know whether NY is any more corrupt than other states, I'd imagine other states that are largely controlled by party machines have similar levels of corruption. If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. 2) While many districts are controlled by local party machines, they are not invincible. It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork (funnily enough, in some areas the local Rep party will help with this. NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this).
    - chimeracoder 7y ago
      > If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. Tammany Hall still exists. My own local Democratic club, for example, literally compares itself to Tammany Hall. > It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork The laws around which signatures are considered valid are absurdly stringent, to the point of disenfranchising actual registered Democrats, with the intention of making right-to-ballot petitions infeasible in most districts. > NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this. Fusion voting is a way for major parties to exert control over third parties, not a way for voters registered with a party to exert political pressure against the party establishment.
reallydude 7y ago
The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).
- geggam 7y ago
  Given the spread of corruption and looking for the commonality one cant help but conclude govt overall is creating corruption. eg power corrupts
- jonahhorowitz 7y ago
  From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members. So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project. If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already. See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.
  - rsj_hn 7y ago
    I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap. That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence. And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful: * change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc. * reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects. All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions. Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.
bluedino 7y ago
>> “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Assuming a 5-day work week, $270,000 a year is a crazy amount, isn’t it?
- jandrese 7y ago
  Multiply by 200 people and that's $5.4 million out the door every year.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    $54 million, not $5.4 million.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Not quite that crazy. There is a lot of overhead that comes out of that 1000/day. Medical benefits, retirement, the accountant to track their pay - they are still make 6 figures for sure, but it isn't 270k/year.

the_duke 7y ago

Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Infrastructure projects are always a prime danger for corruption. (large sums of money with customers that aren't under financial pressures like a company, actual or effective cost-plus contracts, chance for politicians to get "lobbied" and make lasting connections, ...) I think it's the same everywhere in the world, with varying degrees of dubiousness.

chimeracoder 7y ago
> Why would that be different from everywhere else though? Corruption in New York is a whole different animal than any other state. New York has, hands down, the most corrupt state government in the country.[0] As just one example, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, openly orchestrated an illegal[1] coup to ensure that Republicans maintained control of the state senate, despite losing control in the then-recent elections. He did this because it ensured that he had unilateral power to decide which laws were even brought to a vote in the state legislature, so he could essentially pre-veto any legislation behind closed doors, instead of having to veto a potentially popular piece of legislation openly after the legislature passed it. Or, on the topic of public transit, Cuomo stole $5 million from the MTA (public transit for NYC metro area) and gave it to upstate ski resorts that he has a personal interest in[2]. [0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york-became-most-corrupt-state-in-america-117652 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/how-new-york... [1] A judge later ruled that the caucus was illegally formed and ordered them to return the money, though I don't know if they ever actually did. [2] https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php https://gothamist.com/2017/07/10/mta_tips_down_k_val.php
- User23 7y ago
  Can confirm. New York crookedness is so advanced I can’t help having a grudging admiration. It’s been like that longer than any of us have been alive too.
- ameister14 7y ago
  I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat?
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > I think Illinois gives NY a run for their money. Remember Blagojevich trying to sell the senate seat? Blagojevich is an amateur. He got caught. The ones who are the best at corruption are the ones who can keep it up for years - decades - successfully.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Money is really good at masking systemic problems (like government run by idiots, corruption, etc) because you can just throw money at wherever the problem rears it's head. I don't know if Chicago is more corrupt or they're just less able/willing to put up an expensive front of propriety. Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      >Everyone loves to cite the number of politicians that get prosecuted or go to jail for corruption. To me that says the corruption doesn't run very deep. Meh, it could also simply be deep local corruption and shallow Federal corruption. If the FBI is coming, that doesn't mean that your State government isn't corrupt, just that it doesn't have enough power to influence federal.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Local government in Chicago is designed to make corruption as efficient as possible. The alderman are like mini dictators.

jdc0589 7y ago

get out

ComputerGuru 7y ago

Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future.

chimeracoder 7y ago
> Regardless of whether it is cost effective to do so or not, each and every one of the beneficiaries from such corruption should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, no matter how expensive it gets, to set a precedent so others might think twice in the future. I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in New York state government. New Yorkers unfortunately can't do anything about it, because a combination of state laws have ceded electoral power to a handful of local pay-to-play clubs[0] which determine which candidates are permitted to run (unopposed) in elections. [0] Each district is controlled by a local club; membership in these starts around $1000/year, and these clubs are responsible for deciding when a local candidate receives a primary challenge. If the clubs don't approve a challenge, then the primary election is cancelled.
- twunde 7y ago
  1) I don't know whether NY is any more corrupt than other states, I'd imagine other states that are largely controlled by party machines have similar levels of corruption. If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. 2) While many districts are controlled by local party machines, they are not invincible. It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork (funnily enough, in some areas the local Rep party will help with this. NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this).
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > If you look at historical political machines (Tammany Hall, Kansas City), it seems that there used to be more corruption. Tammany Hall still exists. My own local Democratic club, for example, literally compares itself to Tammany Hall. > It's still possible to get on a democratic primary ballot without the support of Dem machine, you just need to get the required number of signatures by registered Dems and file the paperwork The laws around which signatures are considered valid are absurdly stringent, to the point of disenfranchising actual registered Democrats, with the intention of making right-to-ballot petitions infeasible in most districts. > NY's rule allowing candidates to run on multiple parties helps with this. Fusion voting is a way for major parties to exert control over third parties, not a way for voters registered with a party to exert political pressure against the party establishment.

reallydude 7y ago

The California High Speed Rail was also corruption. It's all over everywhere, because nobody is accountable for it, except the people over-charging, while simultaneously pointing out that they are taking all the liability when things go wrong (and someone actually tries to prosecute).

geggam 7y ago
Given the spread of corruption and looking for the commonality one cant help but conclude govt overall is creating corruption. eg power corrupts
jonahhorowitz 7y ago
From my conversations with people who worked on HSR - a lot of the problem was we outsourced the decisions to expensive consulting agencies, and those agencies saw the project as a place to stash their most useless staff members. So basically we had a bunch of very expensive idiots running an outsourced project. If they had kept the whole project in house, we'd have the initial operating segment already. See also, CEQA is a terrible law that mostly blocks good things and rarely blocks bad things.
- rsj_hn 7y ago
  I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap. That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence. And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful: * change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc. * reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects. All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions. Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.

bluedino 7y ago

>> “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Assuming a 5-day work week, $270,000 a year is a crazy amount, isn’t it?

jandrese 7y ago
Multiply by 200 people and that's $5.4 million out the door every year.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  $54 million, not $5.4 million.
bluGill 7y ago
Not quite that crazy. There is a lot of overhead that comes out of that 1000/day. Medical benefits, retirement, the accountant to track their pay - they are still make 6 figures for sure, but it isn't 270k/year.