Yesterday, I drove my family back to Ohio after a weekend in Maryland with the parents. Coming across the bridge over the Ohio river in Wheeling, WV, the first thing you see is a sign welcoming you to Ohio in large letters. In slightly smaller letters, it names John Kasich as our governor and Mary Taylor as the Lieutenant Governor. My wife made the comment, “They have to pay somebody to go around and change all of those every time we elect someone new.” I sort of brushed it off saying that there wasn’t that many of those signs, so “…no big deal.” But afterward I got to thinking about it.
In Interstate terms (and I’m just guessing here), there are at least seven of these signs on the major highways (I’m welcome to someone correcting me). There are probably various others on non-Interstate, yet still major state routes, such as OH-50, OH-33, OH-35, etc., not to mention the National road (40). For the sake of argument, let us assume that there are 20 of these signs, which I think is probably conservative.
So a new governor takes office and the order goes out to change the signs. Does the governor’s office do this? Or more likely, it is one of those automatic, administrative things that no one has thought about for years. Maybe encoded in the Ohio Administrative Code. Anyway. The order goes out to the state printing service. Or maybe we have outsourced that to private interests already, and they proceed to print up these giant magnetic stickers to be placed on the metal signs throughout the state. Then they are delivered to various road crews in various counties, who proceed to dispatch guys to take take down the magnetic stickers of the old guy and put up the new ones. Now, anyone who drives into Ohio is sure to know who runs the joint.
I don’t know how much this costs. I doubt many people do. There are material costs, driving costs, labor costs, disposal costs, etc. In the near term, I’m sure these costs wouldn’t save the state budget, or even a particular school district, such as the Oregon school district outside of Toledo, who are facing a loss of up to $3M in operating budget over the next two years if Kasich’s budget passes. The point is not that eliminating changing the names on signs is going to save gobs and gobs of money, but rather, how many little things that we do add up to a huge amount of waste?
Of course, there is something to be said that it is a waste of time to go after pennies when there are people dealing in dollars. But to that I say that we are almost powerless to effect that sort of change, because we the people are not a giant business interest, and giant business interests are the only thing that affect elections in our country. Even you and a thousand other people can’t cobble together the same political clout that a poorly-positioned lobbyist with a wad of Franklin’s has, so why do we keep running up against that same wall? I don’t know the right answer, but maybe we can work on finding the areas that we can change and going after those, instead of breaking our backs trying to solve unsolvable problems. Maybe having Welcome to Ohio signs without our governor’s name on it will only save a couple of grand every six years, but if we find enough of those areas, they can add up to real savings.
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