Perhaps things are different in other parts of the state, but it has seemed that the new Dept. of Transportation (DOT) signs displaying their proud green on-time-and-on-budget dots are mostly planted around relatively small paint jobs.  Painting’s important, of course, but the metaphor of bragging about it is too appropriate to let slide.

Within the first two pages of today’s Providence Journal, for example, we learn of DOT’s botching the roll-out of a temporary lane change, causing untold damage to the Rhode Island economy and the continued travails for people on public assistance after the botched roll-out of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP).  Now add in Nick Domings’s reporting for WPRI about “Dozens of dams in RI deemed unsafe“:

Dozens of dams in Rhode Island are in rough shape. In fact, dozens of them are in high-risk areas, and failure could cause death and catastrophic damage, according to the R.I. Department of Environmental Management.

To be fair, some of these dams are privately owned, but if we’re going to give government the role of inspecting and regulating even private infrastructure, it should be doing so (rather than the myriad other tasks government sets for itself).  More importantly, can anybody have confidence in the people who run state government to handle a real catastrophe?  If they can’t manage even a simple lane change, planned well in advance, and if $364,000,000 and years of preparation aren’t enough for it to implement new a software system smoothly, why should we expect that state government will do anything but make matters worse when something really bad happens unexpectedly?

A comment from Raymond Carter comes to mind both as a wake-up call and a warning:

The (very sad) truth is that sane crooks like Murphy, Paiva-Weed, Gina, Paolino, Mattiello and DeSimone will be a fond memory once the progressive crazies take over the asylum. Get ready for $100,000 babysitters with state pensions. Get prepared for Venezuelan style government, economics and collapse.

And in the face of all of this, Rhode Islanders remain poorly informed and apathetic.