To the editor:

Cooked numbers plus half-baked analysis equals “recipe for disaster.” No, this is not the title of Martha Stewart’s forthcoming prison cookbook/ investment guide, but it well could be the title of a future business school case study of the Kansas Department of Administration’s plan to terminate the employee van pool program. Fully 70 percent of the members of the Kansas Senate have sponsored SB 506, which continues this program.

Space precludes a full detailing of DoA’s missteps thus this sample:

• Failure to follow its own regulation KAR 1-23-2(a) that creates the van pool program review committee. The function of this committee is to advise the secretary of Administration on expansion or contraction of the scope of the van pool program. The committee apparently has never met.
• Ignoring the budgetary inconsistency of terminating the van pool in one part of the budget while in another part (The Energy Program of the Kansas Corporation Commission) funding RideShare programs in Kansas City and Wichita.
• Using Enron-style accounting mechanisms to retroactively assign newly found “costs” to the van pool program presto chango turning a surplus (as documented by two Legislative Post Audit studies) into a deficit. LPA found that DoA’s cost estimates of van pool administrative costs “far exceeded” the estimates of the actual motor pool staff involved in administering the program.

It’s time for DoA to withdraw this ill-conceived proposal and stop wasting the Legislature’s time. The van pool program is self-supporting as established by law and as verified by two independent studies. Its environmental benefits are incontrovertible.

George Dugger,

Lawrence