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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (597040)	1/6/2011 7:05:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573211

All the trucks and snow removal equipment If your only covering say a three year storm, rather than a 6 year one then (on the average) you get clobbered every three years. The cost to the city of being buried under snow every 6 years for a longer than normal period of time is probably larger than the incremental cost to cover the extra snow removal equipment. Note I'm not directly passing judgment on NYC here, I'm not saying anything about how adequate or inadequate its response was. I'm making a more general point about being able to cover 6 year snow storms or other problems. Once every six years is a pretty common event. all the sand and salt Pretty cheap in comparison to the other costs, it doesn't need much maintenance, it just sits there, if you stockpile more than you need, you just use it up later. .all the personnel needed to run that equipment That should be handled in a more flexible way, contracting out, OT, etc. Perhaps union rules, or political influence, or just the habbits of the managers or their politician bosses, keep this from happening, but if so that's poorly managing the resources. (Esp. in light of all the other ways NYC puts the money to use that are less useful.) Until recently it paid teachers to sit in "rubber rooms" for years that it could fire them (if it ever could) even now firing is a long expensive process, much more than it should be. It (to be fair like many other jurisdictions) set contracts with too high of pension payments and other benefits for all sorts of workers. It spends too much on intrusive and unneeded regulation and anti-competitive business rules ($0 would be too much here, but its spends a lot more than that).