Money down the drain

So, what do you do with a brand-spanking-new $88 million, 150-room veterans’ residential-care facility you can’t afford to open?

Although 98 percent complete, the Redding veterans’ home probably won’t open until around January 2014, if then. Gov. Jerry Brown says there’s no money to hire the required staff and operate the facility.

Even by government standards of inefficiency and ineptitude, this screw-up rises to a new level of incompetence and lunacy. Heads ought to roll for making a decision to construct such a facility without guaranteeing funds were going to be available to actually use it.

The governor’s solution is to put the home in “mothball” status until the state can afford to officially open it. This includes paying a cadre of folks to babysit the facility even though no one’s going to be using it for quite some time.

For the 2012-13 fiscal year, according to my sources, California taxpayers get to pay a tidy little sum of $1.4 million to implement Brown’s “mothball” plan for the Redding home. That’s roughly $140,000 a month!

What an absolute waste! Nothing like pouring good money down the proverbial rat hole and getting absolutely nothing in return. It’s an insult to every taxpayer in the state. And voters ought not to tolerate it.

If the state can’t open the Redding Veterans Home on schedule for its intended purpose of serving California’s veteran community, then it needs to find another good use for it … at least in the short term.

Frankly, it seems unconscionable to me to have such a beautiful housing facility sit idle and empty when so many of our brothers and sisters find themselves without shelter from the elements during these hard times. Perhaps a partnership between state and local philanthropic groups could be formed to make something good out of an otherwise very distressing situation.

Dare I say, it’s the right thing to do.