Maintenance is not a gimme

Every homeowner knows that buying the house — and paying the mortgage — is only half of what it takes to own a house. One has to spend a lot of time and attention and money to keeping the house up. I’m not talking about vacuuming the floor and scrubbing the sink here, but in keeping the yard trimmed, keeping the paint in good shape, dealing with plumbing problems, periodically replacing the roof, doing what’s necessary to reverse the march of entropy and rot.

Capital maintenance is a problem in business, because it tends to be secondary, something outside the loop of sales and production and revenue. Still, most businesses realize that if you don’t fix leaks in you factory, your assembly line will have to shut down, and if you don’t keep the refrigerators running, your restaurant doesn’t have a happy future in front of it.

In government it’s even worse, because of what drives so much program spending — political ego. Put another way, would you, as Congressman Fred Jones fund the building of what will be the Fred Jones Memorial Shiny Facility, or allocate money to have the old Joe Smith Memorial Dingy Facility repainted and recarpeted? If you’re the Department Manager, which is easier to sell to Rep. Jones? And, as a Department Manager, would you rather have, as your legacy, that you saw a Bright, Sparkling New Program initiated and helping 100,000 people who had never been helped before, or have as your legacy that you kept an Old, Below-the-Fold, Started-by-Someone-Else Program simply maintained and running, helping 100,000 people just as they had been by your predecessor?

It’s ego, and it’s politics, it’s How Things Get Done. The problem is not that the new facillities and programs aren’t important, but that by giving the older, proven, established, built facilities / programs short shrift, you’re squandering the investment that initially went into them and the purpose that they serve.

Take, for example, our Air Traffic Control system. We’re the USA, so We’re Number One, right? And certainly a lot of people, including Congresscritters, fly, so we assume it’s all nothing but the best, esp. after Reagan showed the Air Traffic Controllers who was the Boss, right?

But the ATC system is just as vulnerable — in facilities and in people — to rot as anything else, without investment and attention and support … none of which have been much forthcoming in the past quarter-century, and even less so in the last eight years. Take these observations from someone who knows quite a few Air Traffic Controllers (bolding mine) …

So, imagine my horror – as a frequent flier – when they began to complain louder and more frequently about the unpleasant and often dangerous policies put in place during the Bush administration. The problems go back decades, but have been exacerbated and even accelerated under the current administration. The controllers are seeing forced mandatory overtime, decreased pay, less training, fewer vacation/personal days, and a national radar system filled with antiquated equipment. The low morale has caused many experienced controllers to retire as soon as they become eligible. In fact, since 2006, more than 20% of the workforce has quit or retired, largely due to the increasingly unsatisfactory working conditions. Many veteran controllers (hired in 1981 during the Reagan administration) left at their earliest possible retirement dates and attrition rates continue to beat all previous projections.

Remember, “human capital” is as valuable physical capital. Remember how Circuit City decided to cut costs by firing its most highly paid (and most successful) sales people? How has that worked out for them? Losing 20% of your workforce voluntarily is a huge turnover for a professional organization, leading to loss of both immediate skills, training cadres, institutional memory, and a chunk of your people best able to solve the problems at the organization, thus making the problems worse.

As if losing 20% of a veteran force weren’t scary enough, the FAA – under the Bush administration and now former FAA Administrator Marion Blakely – began privatizing the training of controllers. In the process they lowered applicant standards, provide less training, and offer lower pay with fewer benefits to the freshest faces at America’s radar screens.

Because, remember — air traffic safety is just where you want to be scrimping and saving and taking shortcuts in order save a little money, right?

Of course, the whole issue of privatizing aspects of the federal government is one that bears some discussion and debate. From an objective standpoint, it is indeed possible to cut some costs (usefully) and promote efficiencies through competition (assuming bidding and rebidding competition exists). But as a person who has seen good outsourcing projects and bad outsourcing projects, the biggest problem with such efforts is loss of accountability, of knowledge of whether the job is being done properly, even by the folks left to supervise the contracts. Add to this that a lot of these privatizing efforts have been driven as much for private profit as public cost savings and you see the problem.

And while America’s air traffic controllers oversee more than half of all air traffic worldwide, the equipment they use is already out-of-date, often faulty, and well on its way to becoming obsolete. Now former FAA administrator Marion Blakely proposed a new system, dubbed “NextGen”, that is supposed to solve all our air traffic woes and be in place in the year 2020. Unfortunately, the FAA has taken exactly ZERO input from our air traffic controllers on the proposed new system. Would you build a system for removing gall bladders or repairing a heart and not include input from surgeons or medical personnel? The very people who have the knowledge and know-how to help successfully create the new system have been completely frozen out of the process. Many see this as another way to demoralize the work force and as yet another union busting tool from the anti-union and anti-worker Bush administration. The FAA has even gone out of its way to lend the appearance of controllers being involved in the process, but NATCA has not been invited to participate whatsoever. Complicating matters even more, the FAA hasn’t even explained what Next Gen really is and how it would fix the system. As one NATCA representative put it — “Next Gen is widely acclaimed and rarely explained.” Never mind the fact that a plan to have it in place around 2020 is too little too late.

The difficulty here being (aside from the Feds — and states and airlines and airpors — being unwilling to face up to the massive costs of retooling the ATC system) that since St. Ronnie fired all the ATC controllers, they’ve been personae non gratae at the table in anything having to do with running the system. Which is just stupid, but that’s politics.

Aside from the ancient radar equipment, the FAA has set-out to cut corners at every opportunity. In August of 2007 there was a radar and radio outage in Memphis, TN, which caused hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed. Unfortunately for travelers that day, the radar and radio phone lines went out. In a normal situation, the back-up lines would have been used. But, in a cost-cutting effort, the FAA did not install the necessary back-up lines and when the main line went out, Memphis was shut down. In a pinch, air traffic controllers resorted to using their own personal cell phones to navigate traffic until the system was back online, but the entire incident could have been avoided by installing the recommended back-up equipment. Bringing down expenses is one thing, knowingly endangering thousands in the name of saving a few bucks is entirely another.

Which brings us back to the question of skimping on physical capital maintenance and the consequences thereof.

The only thing we can be sure of is that there will be a flurry of finger-pointing and commission-appointing the next time a failure in the ATC system leads to a plane crash and deaths.