But even if making the markers is cheap, installing all of them (including figuring out the right locations, setting up temporary work zones, etc.) every 0.2 mile might make the markers part of the project a large fraction of the $3.5 million.
In fact, it is not. We do not have to guess at any of this because MoDOT makes bid results and bid tabulations available online.
The article is actually misleading in another respect--it says that MoDOT "announced" the signing job in February 2012. In fact MoDOT advertised the contract for a letting date of October 21, 2011, under call number G01 (contract number 111021-G01):
http://www.modot.gov/business/contractor_resources/bid_opening_info/postBid.shtml?lettingDate=10%2F21%2F2011(Unfortunately I cannot link to the PDF files directly because of the way these pages are coded.)
G01 is broken into two separate jobs, J4P1989D and J7P0825, each with its own plans set. (The first digit is a district identifier that corresponds to one of the MoDOT districts as they existed before the 2011 reorganization. "0" means pre-2011 District 10.) The bid tabulations are broken down separately for each job. The 1220 emergency reference markers the article cites (not even an accurate figure) is broken down into 166 for J4P1989D and 1176 for J7P0825, for a total of 1342. MoDOT has an all-inclusive bid item for emergency reference markers (i.e., whatever the contractor bids for one unit of "emergency reference marker" is supposed to cover all the associated costs to the contractor of fabrication and installation, plus a certain element of profit for the contractor).
The low bid for 111021-G01 included unit bids of $243.68 under J4P1989D and $234.18 under J7P0825 for "emergency reference marker," for a total cost of $315,849.56 out of the $3.5 million low bid.
Bottom line:
* Emergency reference markers comprise less than one-tenth of the contract value.
* The article overstates the total cost of the emergency reference markers by factors of more than ten for both the District 4 and District 7 components of the contract.
The article is, in short, unmitigated twaddle. I think Scott is correct in attributing authorship to a non-journalist. My own guess is an angry anti-tax conservative. Since the
Examiner is an Independence/Blue Springs/Grain Valley suburban paper and rural and suburban papers in general tend to lean conservative, the article was probably an easy pitch to the
Examiner's editors, who should nevertheless have fact-checked it more aggressively.
(I do have some experience writing newspaper opinion pieces since I was an opinion columnist for the KSU
Collegian for a couple of semesters when I was doing my undergraduate degrees. I know from personal experience that if I quoted facts in one of my opinion pieces, and my editor subsequently received a letter pointing out that these facts were wrong, I would be called into my editor's office to explain where I had sourced my facts and what checks I had done to ensure that they were correct.)