Money, We Don’t Want your Stinking Money

I had to go up to the capitol this morning for a meeting at the Office of Elections. I am on a group which reviews grant requests for making their polling placing more accessible, or just accessible. I am not talking bout the new fangled voting machines I am talking about access basics, parking spaces, steps and stairs, door knobs and signage. We have had more then a hundred thousand dollars to work with this year but we cannot seem to give it away.

This is how the grant program, a municipality may have a polling place which is not accessible: i.e., a fire station in a rural community. This is an old fire station, maybe over a hundred years old. The building is still being used as a fire place and once every couple of years the building is also used as a polling place. It’s going to take thousands of dollars to bring this place into compliance—if you can even bring the building into compliance. That’s cool, we’ll give then dough if they can show us how it’s going to be used for the balloting. We are easy, we want to give this money away but we cannot give the money away. The people who need to do the building rehabs either or too illiterate to fill out the grant request or too lazy or too apathetic. What every the reason we have to keep making decisions to send the grant request back to the filer requesting more information . For example, each of the requests are supposed to with three bids or estimations for the project. Contractors really should know how to do this, especially if they wish to win the bid and complete the contract. They just cannot do it. This morning , what looked like last minute pieces of work came in on legal pads, scratch pads, number did not add up , simple math. I counted the words in one quote, like eight words in the entire quote! Unbelievable! We are currently what, less then a month away from Election Day. It’s a sure bet these places will not be accessible for this election…hopefully by next Election Day they will. We are sending the bids back with letter of explanation requesting more information. So hopefully next year their fire station will be accessible.